Client: Endowment for Health, New Hampshire
Focus Areas: Strategic Planning | Board Development | Leadership Alignment | Organizational Assessment | Stakeholder Engagement | Risk Assessment | Strategic Facilitation
The Challenge: Turning Bold Vision Into Thoughtful Action
The Endowment for Health is a New Hampshire-based foundation committed to improving the health and well-being of communities across the state.
As the organization considered how to pursue bold and meaningful change, its Board and leadership faced an important challenge: How could the Endowment embrace greater strategic opportunities while remaining thoughtful about organizational capacity, financial sustainability, mission alignment, and risk?
The challenge was not simply identifying new priorities. It was establishing a shared understanding of what bold, thoughtful action meant for the organization and developing a practical framework that would help Board members and staff evaluate opportunities consistently.
The Endowment needed a process that would encourage open dialogue, incorporate different perspectives, strengthen alignment, and translate strategic conversations into actionable decisions.
DMC’s Approach: Creating Alignment Through Engagement and Strategic Facilitation
Deo Mwano Consultancy partnered with the Endowment for Health to design and facilitate an engagement process that brought together Board members, executive leadership, staff, and advisers.
Rather than approaching the work as a traditional strategic retreat, DMC developed a structured process that connected organizational reflection, stakeholder perspectives, strategic decision-making, and implementation readiness.
Organizational Assessment and Stakeholder Engagement
DMC gathered perspectives from Board members, organizational leadership, staff, and advisers to understand how participants viewed the Endowment’s mission, strategic direction, opportunities, and potential risks.
This process helped identify areas of alignment, differing perspectives, and questions requiring further discussion.
Board and Leadership Facilitation
DMC designed and facilitated interactive discussions that encouraged participants to examine strategic opportunities from multiple perspectives.
Small-group conversations, structured reflection, and facilitated dialogue created opportunities for Board members and staff to challenge assumptions, consider alternative approaches, and build a shared understanding of the organization’s direction.
Balancing Opportunity, Risk, and Organizational Capacity
A central component of the engagement involved helping the Endowment evaluate strategic opportunities against several important considerations:
- Alignment with organizational mission and values
- Potential community impact
- Financial sustainability and fiduciary responsibility
- Operational capacity and organizational readiness
- Regulatory and reputational considerations
- The potential benefits and consequences of strategic risk-taking
This approach helped move the conversation beyond whether an opportunity was appealing to whether the organization was positioned to pursue it responsibly.
Developing a Practical Risk Assessment Framework
DMC translated the discussions and findings into a repeatable Risk Assessment Framework designed to support future strategic decisions.
The framework connected mission, potential impact, risk, organizational readiness, and long-term sustainability, providing leadership and the Board with a more consistent approach to evaluating opportunities.
The Impact: Stronger Alignment and Confidence in Strategic Decision-Making
Post-retreat evaluation results demonstrated positive participant experiences and confidence in the Board’s ability to navigate strategic decisions.
- 100% of respondents rated the retreat effective or very effective.
- 100% expressed confidence in the Board’s ability to identify and manage risk.
- 90% reported feeling prepared by the pre-retreat activities.
- 81.8% identified group discussions as among the most effective components of the experience.
Beyond the evaluation findings, DMC delivered a practical framework that the Endowment could use to guide future conversations and decisions.
The engagement helped establish a shared foundation for considering strategic opportunities, evaluating trade-offs, and connecting organizational ambition with thoughtful governance.
Building Capacity Beyond the Retreat
An important aspect of DMC’s work was ensuring that the engagement produced more than a successful Board retreat.
The Risk Assessment Framework provided a structure for continued discussion and evaluation, helping the organization approach future opportunities through consistent criteria.
The work demonstrated how strategic facilitation can strengthen governance by helping Boards and leadership teams engage different perspectives, navigate uncertainty, and make decisions grounded in mission, capacity, and impact.
What This Work Demonstrates
The Endowment for Health engagement highlights DMC’s ability to support foundations, nonprofit Boards, and executive leadership teams navigating complex strategic decisions.
DMC combines stakeholder engagement, organizational assessment, structured facilitation, qualitative and quantitative feedback, and practical framework development to help organizations move from broad aspirations to more disciplined decision-making.
The result is not simply greater alignment during a meeting, but a stronger foundation for the decisions that follow.