CASE STUDY 1: TEXAS CLIMATE COMMS TIME BANK
Building Climate Communications Capacity In Texas
In 2024, The Funder Collaborative on Oil and Gas, in partnership with the Jacob and Terese Hershey Foundation and the David Rockefeller Fund contracted with Remedios Consulting to perform a Landscape Analysis and facilitate a learning process to better understand the communications capacity and needs among climate and environmental justice organizations in Texas. The project included over 50 hours of conversation, hearing from over 30 Texas-based organizational leaders and communications experts, and facilitating a working group made of communications leaders. Through this learning process, Remedios Consulting developed, pitched, and secured seed funding for the forthcoming Texas Climate Comms Time Bank. The Texas Climate Comms Time Bank will launch in 2026, and is a pooled fund dedicated to building climate comms capacity in the state. The project will be housed at the Climate Advocacy Lab. The Time Bank will allow Texas climate funders to collaboratively contribute to a solution, allowing grantees room to experiment and grow, alongside access to communications pros who can help - all at no cost to the organization receiving help. The Time Bank will enable Texas-based climate and environmental justice nonprofits to secure a variety of types of communications expertise, depending on the needs of the organization. Through the Time Bank, Climate Advocacy Lab will facilitate organizations to contract support from external consultants, ensuring that professional help is quickly funded and easy to find.
Grant Strategy Socialization
The Hive Fund revisited our grant strategy in mid-2025 to ensure that our grantmaking was in alignment with what our grantee partners needed. As a place based grantmaker, we wanted to double down on the investments we were making in frontline leaders and their organizing. To do this, we drafted a strategy update and then visited grantee partners in their community to ensure that we’d read the moment correctly. Because she knows the field well, and works with many of our partners in the region, Kandace was a natural choice to help us with our strategy socialization meetings in South Texas. Kandace asked clarifying questions that really helped us distill a dense deck full of ideas and concepts into a fun and interactive meeting. She worked with the team to co-design a collaborative feedback process that worked well, both for the Hive Fund and for our grantee partners. Rather than presenting slides full of information and asking folks for questions or feedback, Kandace transformed our content into an engaging workshop that enabled multi-directional conversation. Grantees moved around the room during different activities, adding their thoughts and questions to the core ideas our strategy contained. By the end of each day’s socialization meeting, our grantee partners helped us deepen our analysis and find new avenues for potential investment. They also made new connections and built new relationships with each other. We ended the engagement with a field-tested grant strategy that helped us move in real time to center our grantee partner’s expertise. All of this was a result of Kandace’s depth of knowledge about the field, expertise in movement organizing, and her participatory facilitation approach.
CASE STUDY 2:
HIVE FUND
CASE STUDY 3: BORDER WORKERS UNITED
Revenue Strategy and Security
Border Workers United is a legacy organization formed in 2006 to fight for the rights of immigrant workers on the Texas/Mexico border. In 2025, their Executive Director reached out for help with their revenue development. This project demonstrates how a relatively modest investment from the organization and its funders supercharges growth and creates lasting organizational stability and security. We worked together for an initial 5 months, during which I created a Revenue Development Strategy and Security toolkit for the organization. After one year, the organization more than doubled its budget, bringing in over $1M in revenue, through implementing my Story - Strategy - Systems - Security framework. The project kicked off with a 360 organizational assessment and interviews with staff, board, org partners and funders. Document review deep-dives. SWOT. Team engagement. Check-backs with what I was learning to validate my assumptions. Then we got to work fixing things. Story: The core story of the organization was really impressive, but the telling of it felt diffuse. We fixed this by building some core documents, like logic models, concept notes, and a pitch deck. I also provided some training to the ED on how to conduct funder calls - demonstrating her leadership presence and putting her in the driver seat during donor cultivation. Strategy: Turned out, the organization's core strategy was there, but needed a tune-uo, because the organization's work had become more intersectional as a result of increasing climate impacts on their members. We fixed this by documenting the breadth of the org's current work, and realigning program pillars with revenue opportunities. We also co-created a new Theory of Change statement to guide how the organization tells their unique strategy story - and why it matters. Systems: We identified where the systems were either broken, or at zero and needed to be built entirely. I created a custom revenue pipeline management process for the ED to implement, along with a revenue tracker. Security: During project, I also uncovered some financial management capacity gaps and organizational security risks. Rather than put capacity gaps and security risks in a report with 'recommendations' to fix later, I got to work with the ED to find dedicated funds to deploy ASAP. Organizational security dollars enabled us to put key protections in place, and hire expert help from my partners at Toloache Consulting to close gaps through processes that will keep the client safe and financially stable.