Ken Middleton (EL ’15, LL ’00), Middleton Consulting

In March, Encore Louisville completed its first cycles of engagements with nonprofits. From my perspective, this newest program of Leadership Louisville is a terrific success.  Our class of 35 members fielded advisory teams that worked with seven nonprofits over three months. Six more projects have been selected for the next three-month cycle.

Graduates of Leadership Louisville programs like me who are retired, nearing retirement, and in career transition, were selected for this program to provide strategic and tactical advice to challenges faced by nonprofits.

As Encore Louisville members, we offer our cumulative years of experience, network connections, and community involvement to – pardon the overused phrase – “make a difference”.  Nonprofit CEOs and Executive Directors get the benefit of a powerful consulting team for a very focused, short-term, collaborative search for strategies and action plans:

• Big Brothers, Big Sisters: a plan for recruiting volunteers over 55
• Colon Cancer Prevention Project: build on a solid awareness campaign with pilot projects to encourage people to actually be tested
• Family and Children’s Place: a business plan for ‘shared” support services with other nonprofits to create efficiencies and control expenses
• Food Literacy Project: an organizational plan for growth and HR policies
• Restorative Justice Louisville: a plan to increase awareness and credibility for this alternative judicial process for youth offenders
• School Choice Scholarships: a plan to increase financial support
• St John Center for Homeless Men: transform its occasional tours into a powerful marketing and recruitment experience for volunteers and donors.

I can tell you based on conversations with my classmates, we concluded our engagements with immense satisfaction as well as a better understanding of the contributions of the nonprofits to the community. The fringe benefit for the nonprofit —  a cadre of “ambassadors” who can and will tell their story.

For those of us in the program, retirement from whatever was our last job is just a passage from one phase of our professional lives to another. And with Encore Louisville, I get to work along side of 35 of the most interesting, smart, thoughtful, successful and invigorating folks you can imagine.

Learn more about Encore Louisville

Nonprofits, learn more about the opportunity to work with teams of Encore Louisville participants.