"Lupe is an incredible wealth of knowledge. She brings with her decades of experience having served in a variety of roles in the nonprofit world. She is incredibly warm while also holding you accountable for accomplishing your goals. I have genuinely grown under her mentorship over the past two years, and I am so grateful for her."
Bianca Davila
Bianca DavilaManaging Director, One America
"I have greatly appreciated working with Lupe and her team, the professionalism, experience and care were exemplary! I highly recommend SWAN."
Michelle Arellano,
Michelle Arellano, Executive Director, Centers for Spiritual Living
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Programs & Services

Board Development

Facilitate a strategic planning process that is transparent and inclusive and that focuses on clear strategic directions, increasing the impact of the organization, building bridges, and addressing organizational structural barriers identified through the process with compassion and healing.
Facilitate Board retreats to onboard new board members, build relationships, and understand the role of the board as the organization goes through transitions and as the organization goes through stages of growth.
Work with the CEO/Executive Director and Senior Management to address internal tensions based on race, gender identity, age, approach to work, patriarchy, and white supremacy.
Facilitate various team-building processes that address trauma and poor communication, resulting in more coordination between the staff and the board.
Assist the Board of Directors in creating succession planning processes to ensure the smooth transition to new board leadership and the assessment and hiring of a new Chief Executive Officer or Executive Director.

SENIOR ADVISOR

Coach and advise the CEO and senior management to create a vision, mission, and strategic plan for the organization. This includes alignment of the Management and Senior Leadership teams and assessment of training needs (including culture, defining inclusion, human resources support for staff, team dynamics, leadership development, etc.).
Develop the systems necessary to support the growth of the organization. The purpose is to ensure staff is aligned and feels ownership of the next organizational phase.
Work with the CEO/Executive Director and Senior team to develop the systems and strategy necessary to address internal tensions based on race, gender identity, age, approach to work, patriarchy, and white supremacy.

Strategic Planning

Facilitate a participatory strategic planning process tailored to the needs of the organization. This includes an environmental scan, developing a vision, revising the mission, and developing up to five strategic directions to ensure management, board, and staff are clear on the organization’s north star.

Organizational Development

Evaluate the organization’s human resources, operations, and infrastructure needs and design systems and processes to address them.
Design and implement, in coordination with management, webinars or in-person series focused on strengthening the organization's human resources, operations, and infrastructure needs.
Provide management webinars and in-person training to ensure Directors and managers understand their roles and responsibilities as the bridge between strategy, people, culture, and the organization's aligners.
Assessment and development of sessions will consider tensions based on race, gender identity, age, approach to work, patriarchy, and white supremacy.
Session Topics will be selected based on the feedback and input from directors and staff, emphasizing the needs and requests from BIPOC, LBTGQ+ staff, and directors.
  • Staffing and Human Resources (could be a few different topics)
  • Building Strong Organizational Culture
  • Crisis Communications
  • Preventing Harassment
  • Team Building and Team
  • Dynamics
  • Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging in the Workplace
  • New Manager/Supervisor Training
  • Defining Inclusion
  • Board support and development
  • Addressing organizational trauma, poor communication, and increasing organizational collaboration and alignment

SWAN CUSTOM WEBINARS

SWAN has extensive experience in creating custom webinars for organizations and networks. We do this by working closely with a planning team, assessing the best topics based on their input, and creating and facilitating webinars that address the identified areas and the target audience.

Coaching

Executive Coaching

Coach new Executive Directors as they navigate organizational transitions.
Provide tailored Executive Director coaching by creating a set of coaching goals and working closely to address challenges and opportunities that they are facing, such as board development and engagement, organizational structures and policies, fundraising, departmental growth, internal and external tensions, long-term planning, finances, and other professional development challenges.
Coach Senior Level staff on creating and implementing long-term plans to address management issues, structural challenges, and racial, economic, and gender justice tensions within the organization's culture.
Advise Senior Leadership on achieving work/life balance and growing their leadership skills to achieve sustainability as they progress in their professional development.

TEAM COACHING

Assess, with the organization’s Senior team, what systems are needed to address Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging, and healthy, sustainable processes as the organization grows.
Provide coaching for teams as they face challenges in team dynamics, such as communication, clarity of role and decision-making processes, understanding of the team's purpose and goals, and making sure everyone understands and agrees with what they are addressing as a team.

INDIVIDUAL COACHING

SWAN provides Individual Coaching for professionals who need a safe space to pause and address their challenges. A minimum 3-month commitment is required to achieve long-term impact. There are also 6-month and 12-month options available.
  • Life/work balance and honoring yourself
  • Working closely to address challenges and opportunities
  • Address immediate issues while working on long-term solutions
  • Focus on your professional challenges and support your professional development growth
  • Engage in transformational change through which individuals improve their health and wellness, live a self-directed life, and strive to reach their full potential, focusing on the four pillars of recovery: community, health, purpose, and support.
  • Provide a confidential environment to question, in a positive way, what you do and why, and then decide whether there is a better or more efficient way of doing it in the future.
  • Take the time to think about, meditate on, evaluate, and consider your behaviors, thoughts, attitudes, motivations, and desires.
  • Increases insight and creates pathways to future learning
  • Organize tasks and priorities, provide guidance on supervising your team better, work on supervision skills and management challenges, and create an action plan to address the current organizational challenges.

Team

SWAN’s leadership team is led by an Advisory Board that represents a wide range of experiences and skills. The work is implemented under the leadership of Lupe Lopez, Principal and Founder of SWAN, A Project of Tides Advocacy. Our Leadership Team uses a participatory approach to assess, develop action plans, implement strategies, and evaluate the impact of our services.
We support BIPOC and LBGTQ+ individuals through services tailored to your organization’s needs. We have created a pool of experienced staff and consultants that expand the depth and reach of SWAN’s expertise, diversity, and backgrounds. This ensures your strategic, capacity-building, and coaching needs are addressed effectively, sensitively, and in service to racial, gender, language, geographic focus, and cultural environments.

Lupe Lopez

FOUNDER + PRINCIPAL

Lupe Lopez is an expert in facilitating organizational transformations. During the last 30 years she has coached dozens of executive directors, senior managers, and leaders to help them be effective agents of change.

Lupe’s purpose is to promote collaborative leadership and create environments that are transparent, support collective participation and support positive and profound transformation in individuals and their organizations. The strategies that emerge from this approach support healthy, thriving individuals and organizations that are valued, increase impact and have a culture that supports the long term work that is needed to create a positive change. Lupe specializes in facilitating complex situations and implementing ambitious plans. Her areas of expertise include fundraising, women’s issues, diversity, equity, and inclusion, management, working with young people, immigrant rights, strategic planning, board development, team building, organizational culture, coaching and mentoring.

Audra Nichole

DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS

Audra comes to us with over fifteen years of business management experience and over six years of retreat facilitation experience, Audra helps us keep everything running smoothly and all engines running on schedule!

She is a Certified QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor, a Licensed Spiritual Practitioner with Centers for Spiritual Living, a Ministerial student through the Holmes Institute of Spiritual Leadership, and a Certified Infinite Possibilities Trainer. She was born and raised in California and now resides in the midwest. When she is not helping us here at SWAN, seeing private clients as a spiritual counselor, or hitting the books, you can find her hanging out horseback riding with friends. Audra is an organization wiz and a boundaries expert. She specializes in enhancing relational dynamics through agreements and boundary work, elevating systems and processes optimization, efficiency improvement, organization and internal structure development, production, facilitation and team development. She keeps us all on track and constantly improving!

Shanaé Calhoun

CONSULTANT + FACILITATOR

Shanaé is raising three teenage daughters with her spouse, Michael. She has thirteen years of community organizing experience for faith-based grassroots organizations in the DART (Direct Action and Research Training) Network. 

She organizes regularly 1000 people direct actions with public officials that has led Kansas to make systemic changes in policy and bring community transformation.
Shanaé has built a sustainable local non-profit organization by raising 72% of her budget through internally generated funds and developing and maintaining 30-active board members. Through Willow Consulting, Shanaé supports community organizers and organizational staff through coaching and training to effectively challenge systemic in justice and creating healthy communities.

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SWAN is a project of Tides Advocacy

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