Your Seat at the Table is a leadership parable for anyone navigating complex partnerships in government, nonprofit or cross-sector work. It equips leaders with a practical, field-tested framework for holding partnerships accountable to what they said they'd do.
The story sets the stage. The companion workbooks provide the compliance tools. The Money Trail: How They Lost It or Stole It and Lines You Shouldn't Cross: Power, Privacy & Policy, provide self-guided training or alongside our coaching to help partners build and implement shared standards, even under pressure.
Perfect for:
Nonprofit leaders navigating complex partnerships
Community organizations preparing for federal funding
Social entrepreneurs scaling their impact
Leaders committed to building collaborations that last
The characters and events in this parable are fictional. The patterns they illustrate are not.
These patterns have a name, and so do the experiences behind them: the partner who captured the process while calling it collaboration, the table set for you instead of with you, the moment you realized centralized power was never going to move.
This book names them and lays out an alternative built on the infrastructure that sustains partnerships rather than relying on goodwill that can let them collapse. You'll find a trust-building framework, shared agreements, and accountability structures here that you can adapt to protect your organization, your community and your work.
The book is organized in four parts: the parable, the trust-building theory woven through it, a self-assessment to understand where you can begin implementing steps to build trust in your own partnerships and resources for exploring the concepts further.
Throughout, you'll find simple hand-drawn visuals that illustrate the key principles, designed to be accessible to recreate in your own work.
This is both a story and a field guide.