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AREAS OF EXPERTISE

  • Fundraising Coaching and Planning

  • Strategic Planning 

  • Board Training and Capacity Building

  • Program Design and Evaluation

  • Executive Coaching

WORKING IN THE LINEAGE OF

My great grandmother Frances’ life ended early and tragically. Though I don’t know much about her, I believe I’m working to continue her lineage which birthed tremendous creativity and strong female leaders. Her mother, my great great grandmother, was one of the first female doctors in California in the early 1900s. We are a lineage of healers, entrepreneurs, and pace setters.

 

I’m also working in the footsteps of Father Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, who continues to lead a groundbreaking institution from a position of unmatched compassion. His visionary ability to build movements while laughing, teasing, and hugging people, has set me on a path to watch what happens when we lead with a non-anxious presence. I’m hoping he’d be OK with me claiming to be “in his lineage.”

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I’m also working in the lineage of poet David Whyte (thanks Dan Reed, you introduced me) who calls us to do things like this:

  • “Be infinitesimal, a creature that even the soaring hawk misses” (Mameen)

  • “Walking as you did in your rags of love and speaking in the voice that by night became a prayer to safe arrival” (Santiago)

  • “And that you were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded rooves of any destination you could reach” (Santiago)

  • “The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest… The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.” (Crossing the Unknown Sea)

HILLARY FRANCES

Strategic Advisor and Senior Coach

Seed

  • LinkedIn

Hillary Frances  joined Seed in 2017 after eight years of experience designing programmatic solutions for organizations serving marginalized populations. She has worked for state government through the Colorado Refugee Services Program, and higher education as the Dean of Adult Education and the Language Learning Center at Emily Griffith Technical College where she was responsible for employment-focused education programs for over 2000 refugee and immigrant students per year. She is the co-founder of Prodigy Ventures, a non-profit social enterprise apprenticeship for young adults in Northeast Denver. These roles have built her reputation as a thoughtful and lean program designer and program evaluator.

Since joining Seed, Hillary has worked side by side with over 125 organizations and nearly 300 leaders as they clarify their strategy and operationalize their day to day practice. She is most animated in her work when helping founders turn ideas into institutions.

APPROACH TO FACILITATION AND COACHING

  • I aim for liberation: what can our most liberated selves dream of doing together? 

  • I aim to trust that the people in the room have the answers. 

  • I aim to locate the conversations that can only happen right now, with these people, in this place. 

  • I aim to call us to our highest order selves. 

  • I aim to acknowledge that which needs to be grieved from our history as individuals and as an organization. 

  • I aim to point people to their innate desire for rigor. 

  • I aim to avoid perfection: “Perfection is a commitment to habitual self-doubt.” –Prentis Hemphill

  • I aim to do the small things well, as they are a reflection of the big.

 

Derived from Emergent Strategy facilitation, the work of movement facilitator adrienne maree brown.

brown, adrienne maree, Holding Change: The way of emergent strategy facilitation and mediation, AK Press, 2021.

RECENT WORK

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