Nicole de Beaufort, Founder and Partner
Nicole is an experienced systems strategist, with a flair for seeing the big (BIG) picture and helping clients give birth to transformative initiatives. Nicole does this by connecting ideas, people and resources, building partnerships and alliances and starting up new organizations and foundations and then bringing them to capacity. Nicole founded Fourth Sector Consulting in 2007 as a for-benefit company dedicated toward making social change along with profits, thereby bridging the traditional for-profit model and the nonprofit world.
With expertise facilitating common visions, Nicole’s work has guided organizations through deep institutional change, connected issues across sectors, and initiated and implemented strategic communications efforts that changed public conversations and how people think about social issues. Nicole has honed and evolved her skills as a strategic communicator, connector, and idea factory for more than a dozen years, first in the world of cancer advocacy, then in health care communications, and for the past nine years in public issues within the Beltway and in the Heartland. A graduate of Williams College with degrees in anthropology and sociology, she is dedicated to supporting the emerging “fourth sector” by erasing institutional barriers to growth. With a propensity for killing “elephants in the room” and for creating an atmosphere of possibility, Nicole also enjoys playing in the ever-growing sandbox that is the social media world.
Connect with Nicole: ndeb@fourthsectorconsulting.com or @NicoledeB
Katie Eukel, Vice President
Katie is a natural strategist, who channels that passion into helping clients navigate tough challenges. With deep experience in cross-sectoral partnerships and issue-oriented communications, she’s especially adept at shifting public conversations, strengthening organizations, and connecting collaborations. Before joining Fourth Sector Consulting, Katie was the communications director at Transit for Livable Communities, a nonprofit organization working to reform Minnesota’s transportation system.
Her expertise in issue framing, strategic communications, and online engagement strategies positioned the organization as a respected national leader in connecting diverse constituencies to transportation decisionmaking. A graduate of Macalester College with a B.A. in Communication & Media Studies, Katie has also worked as a philanthropic communications consultant to national foundations and nonprofit organizations seeking to change America’s food system, and with PBS’ The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, where she helped research and produce local, national, and international news pieces. She’s a graduate of the Humphrey Institute’s Forum for the Practice of Leadership Development, taught through its Center for Integrative Leadership…and she loves building her home record collection.
Connect with Katie: katie@fourthsectorconsulting.com or @KTAndrea
Margaret Adamek, PhD, Executive Vice President Maggi is a strategic thinker, systems change designer, and specialist in building unique, effective collaborations that strengthen good things for the commonwealth. She knows about food, higher education, social change, democratic practice, developing multicultural alliances, and can facilitate, evaluate, strategize, advise and oversee change processes. With twenty years of experience in training, evaluation, program design and management, facilitation, executive coaching, qualitative research, strategic planning and organizational development, she has built numerous successful endeavors in tribal communities, higher education, foundations, public health, sustainable agriculture, and the non-profit sector. Maggi has a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction and is trained as a philosopher of consciousness. With a BA from Carleton College in African American Studies and French Literature and a recipient of the Bush Foundation Leadership Fellowship, this specialized generalist loves to cook, read gossipy blogs, and fantasize about being an urban homesteader.
Connect with Maggi: madamek@fourthsectorconsulting.com
Jacques de Beaufort, Associate
Recently transplanted from the Los Angeles area, Jacques is an artist, thinker, writer, and educator who spent the last decade making paintings and teaching studio art and art-history at various LA area colleges whilst becoming very acquainted with the dark side of suburban sprawl. Among other assorted duties, he maintains a Fourth Sector adjacent blog, “The Lateral Hippogriff”, which chronicles hybrid business models and unconventional forward thinking enterprises that are part of the emerging “for-benefit” movement. A conceptualizer and strategic thinker, Jacques is an advocate for cultural and civic engagement that result in the formation of sane policy responses to a changing and dynamic planetary and human ecology.
Connect with Jacques: jdeb@fourthsectorconsulting.com
Bonnie Azab Powell, Editorial Projects Consultant
Bonnie is a writer, editor, blogger, and pastured-meat slinger based in Oakland, CA, near Berkeley. She manages communications projects for Fourth Sector on an ad-hoc basis: writing newsletters, case studies, and website content; editing policy papers and other strategic communications; and managing other freelance writers and designers.
A technology and business senior writer for Red Herring magazine during the dot-com boom in San Francisco, she switched her focus to sustainable food and green business reporting in 2006. She has worked as an editor for Architecture, Red Herring, Wired, and Edible San Francisco. In addition to those magazines, her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Financial Times, Grist, Meatpaper, Gastronomica, and Condé Nast Traveler. She is the founder and editor of Ethicurean.com, a 3-year-old group blog about food politics with 40,000 readers a month frequently cited in the New York Times and many other media outlets. Several years ago, this former vegetarian embarked on a quest to locate humanely raised, pastured local meat that led her to start the Bay Area Meat Community Supported Agriculture program, a farm-to-consumer meat-distribution network; she currently manages CSA programs for Clark Summit Farm and Soul Food Farm for 250+ families. An avowed geek, Bonnie uses Google Apps to manage not only the CSAs, but her entire life, and treats her iPhone like her second, more-essential brain.
Connect with Bonnie: bonnie@bonniepowell.com or @ethicurean
Meg Canada, Content Consultant
Meg is a librarian by trade who loves to curate digital information. She works on the Lunch Box Project gathering resources and working on content strategy. As a public librarian, Meg also coordinates public training and social media efforts for the Hennepin County forty-one library system. She volunteer hosting the Unsummit, presenting at MinneWebCon, and is a regular contributor to Social Media Breakfast. Canada also sings regularly with the Twin Cities chapter of TechKaraoke.
Connect with Meg: meg.canada@gmail.com or @megcanada