About Us
Gary Daynes
I hold a PhD in American History from the University of Delaware. I have led civic engagement, learning community, and assessment initiatives, and have served as provost, vice president for enrollment management, and vice president for student affairs. I have chaired the boards of charter schools, humanities councils, community development corporations, and congregations. I have also led economic development and entrepreneurship efforts in neighborhoods and small towns. Currently I serve as interim of a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. Read my LinkedIn profile here.
Kristine Daynes
After getting an MBA from Brigham Young University, I launched a career in healthcare IT. I led teams in strategic planning, business operations, and marketing, most recently stabilizing operations during rapid organizational change and a company spinoff. Now as co-founder and principal consultant at Back Porch Consulting, I help colleges, arts organizations, churches, and other non-profits to refine their strategies, adapt infrastructure, and mobilize people to become sustainable organizations. You can view my profile on LinkedIn.
About Back Porch Consulting
We have worked with small and distinctive organizations for over 30 years—sometimes as administrators, sometimes as board members, sometimes as consultants, sometimes as unpaid staff (aka volunteers). We have witnessed the rich, concrete innovations that come from such organizations and how those organizations and their supporting communities are routinely ignored. There is an irony here. The organizations most likely to be the source of ingenious renewal are in places that are easy to overlook.
During the pandemic we found ourselves with family and friends in a small city, working to sustain small organizations in a time of crisis. We gathered on our home’s back porch to talk, plan, commiserate, 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 or 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.