I’ve worked with small and distinctive organizations for almost 25 years–sometimes as an administrator, sometimes as a board member, sometimes as a consultant. In that time two things became clear to me: the richest, most concrete innovations come from those organizations, and those organizations and the communities that support them are routinely ignored.  There is an irony here.  The organizations most likely to be the source of renewal are in places where we are least likely to look.

During the pandemic my family, friends, and I found ourselves in a small city, working to sustain small organizations in a time of crisis.  We gathered on our home’s back porch to talk, to plan, to commiserate, to imagine and design a good future at a time when many people doubted that such a future was possible. The porch was a perfect place for this work: safe and secluded, welcoming and beautiful, easily transformed from meal to meeting, from celebration to church.

We incorporated Back Porch Consulting in November 2020–six months into the pandemic. It is animated by the desire to strengthen small, distinct organizations and to build the ecosystems in which they can flourish. It knows that the practices, tools, and assumptions of big places and powerful organizations don’t always work well at small scale. And it is committed to using the back porch ethos–welcome, comfort, beauty, flexibility, creativity, and discretion–to support the people whose work enlivens small places and small organizations.