Executive Leadership for Complex, Mission-Driven Work

Philanthropic Strategy • Governance • International Partnerships • Portfolio Stewardship

I advise boards, executives and mission-driven organizations navigating growth, organizational change, financial complexity, and consequential decisions.

Explore The Advisory Practice
Explore The Advisory Practice

Experience includes executive oversight of multimillion-dollar international programs, philanthropic fundraising, distressed financial portfolios and partnerships across Indigenous nations, foundations and business enterprises.

what shapes the ecosystem

Organizations move forward when leadership, relating, learning, resources, and decision-making work together.

My work helps leaders see where momentum is growing, where trust or communication is weakening, where decisions are getting stuck, and how growth is occurring.

directing resources with purpose

This is about how resources and opportunity are understood. I help leaders use budgets wisely and fairly, directing resources toward the people, programs, and places most likely to strengthen and move its mission forward.

With visibly (related) systems leaders can invest with greater purpose and build conditions in which people and important work can emerge.

Selected Scope of Experience

My work is grounded in direct responsibility for organizations, programs, financial portfolios, partnerships, and teams.

  • Executive oversight of international social-impact programs growing from approximately $1M to $4.7M annually

  • Management of monthly operating budgets ranging from $20K to $100K

  • Support for philanthropic fundraising exceeding $3M over three years

  • Development of proposals and donor engagement securing commitments of over $1M from a major foundation

  • Design of a federal compliance and recovery system for 50+ distressed small-business loans of approximately $3M–$5M across a federally backed loan portfolio

  • Direct reporting to nonprofit boards on strategy, budgets, performance, compliance, and risk

  • Leadership across multidisciplinary teams, including Indigenous leaders, legal professionals, community organizers, and international partners

  • Collaboration with Indigenous nations, foundations, universities, nonprofits, and cross-sector partners

How I lead & build

  • leading across the ecosystem

    Leading Across the Ecosystem

    I bring leaders, teams, and partners into meaningful exchange across cultures and institutions. I use my Kañari upbringing (Indigenous knowledge systems) alongside organizational strategy to shape more effective ecosystems. I believe in strengthening relationships, clarifying responsibility, and turning different perspectives into coordinated action.

  • Setting direction

    I skillfully identify the forces shaping results, uncover what others may miss, and turn that insight into a clear strategy people can understand and carry forward.

  • Guiding Work Through Change

    I name transitions clearly and make sure people are working from the same information. When the path is uncertain, I strengthen communication and resilience, address challenges or power imbalances, and then clarify decisions, responsibility and the use of resources.

  • Building Programs and Systems

    I design leadership programs, curricula, governance processes, operational plans, budgets, and strategic initiatives that connect vision with execution.

Who I work with

I work with leaders and organizations responsible for shaping strategy, directing resources, and building what comes next.

  • CEOs, presidents, founders, and business owners

  • Indigenous Nations and community leadership

  • Executive and senior leadership teams

  • Boards and governance committees

  • Foundations, family offices, and philanthropic leaders

  • Universities and educational institutions

  • Mission-driven organizations and international initiatives

  • Cross-cultural and cross-sector partnerships

My work is especially valuable where different forms of knowledge, authority and responsibility come together.

Writing, research and media

  • June 2025

    Published on Swamphen, a journal of cultural ecology of the University of Sydney, Australia

    Keynote Essay : Indigenous Embassy

    As Indigenous Peoples, our own orientation to boundaries is incompatible with oppressive constructs because, for us, borders are dynamic, semipermeable sites of relational increase. We will share this orientation from our unique experience of emergent embassy rituals between Cañari and Kara::Kichwa of the Andes::Amazon and Bama/Murri of Australia’s northeast (see Jacobs & Narváez; Yunkaporta).

  • Fall 2026

    Fall 2026

    Emergence Magazine V.7

    “Seeds and Structures”

    By Tyson Yunkaporta, Gabriela Romero, and Stephanie Beck

    Emergence’s seventh print volume will explore the role of seeds and structures in bridging the worlds and sowing a future where we embody an ontology of ecology. Central to this inquiry will be an examination of ancient and existing ways humans work with seeds and structures—spanning physical, cosmological and spiritual, and ecological knowledge systems that honor our sacred relationship with the Earth.

  • The Other Others | November 2024

    Indigenous Borderwork, Kinmaking & Migration
    With J.Gabriela Romero, Nkwi Flores, Amazon Andes First Peoples

    A dialogue exploring the relationships between identity, migration, governance, belonging, and community formation across cultures and territories. The conversation reflects on Indigenous approaches to stewardship, kinship, and collective responsibility, and considers how different systems of knowledge inform the ways people organize, lead, and navigate change.

Enduring Perspectives

These perspectives inform how I see our role in the work, our systems and the conditions that allow people and environments to work with respect and even ease.

These enduring learnings come from my Ecuadorian Kañari background and from a lifetime of learning shaped by family, tradition, observation and lived experience.

Much of this was not taught in formal institutions. It was carried through stories, relationships and the ways my family understood responsibility and relating.

These enduring perspectives are frameworks and master tools that help guide my work, leadership and orientation:

Get in touch

Due to the confidential nature of my work I maintain a deliberately limited public profile and rely on direct professional networks and referrals.