Rooted, spacious & imaginative leadership creates different futures.
Despite good intentions, nonprofit culture can reward overwork, martyrdom, and exhaustion—especially for women and femmes. When leadership operates in survival mode, everyone downstream feels it.
When you are rooted instead of reactive, spacious instead of urgent, and imaginative instead of defensive, your leadership expands. You delegate more clearly. You tolerate complexity better. You make decisions aligned with long-term strategy rather than immediate pressure. You model sustainable authority for your team.
“What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.”
– adrienne maree brown
This is not generic leadership coaching.
❌ Generic leadership coaching:
-
Adds more frameworks on top of pressure
-
Trains executive presence as performance
-
Optimizes productivity and output
-
Frames burnout as a time-management problem
-
Minimizes the systemic and political realities shaping nonprofit leadership
✅ My approach:
-
Expands your nervous-system capacity to metabolize pressure
-
Develops embodied presence, not faking confidence
-
Strengthens discernment for strategic, high-stakes decisions
-
Addresses survival mode at its source
-
Integrates systemic and power dynamics into your leadership decisions
"Highly recommend working with Caitlin!”
“It’s very rare that I engage in deep vulnerable work with non-BIPOC practitioners and coaches. With Caitlin, I’ve seen the ways she embodies humility, presence, confidence, and activism. It’s been an absolute gift to experience her 1:1 coaching. Each session uniquely weaves leadership development, somatics, and strategic planning.
As a former Healing Justice Program Director supporting Queer & Trans survivors of violence, the political climate weighed heavily on my colleagues and I, making hope and possibility feel distant. Caitlin provides practical tools to transform fear, anxiety, and rage into a grounded vision. I would have benefited from her compassionate inquiries, firm encouragement, and guidance into emotional depth.
Our work together renewed my determination, agency and creativity, and my professional and personal relationships have improved. I’m forever grateful and highly recommend working with Caitlin!”
- Dominique Cowling, Black Seeds Project
Everyone has a role in the revolution.
This is mine.
Hi, I’m Caitlin.
Raised by a working-class, intersectional feminist and an artist in the Midwest, I learned early how to question authority, think outside the box, and live off-page from the dominant story.
From a young age, I was deeply aware of the injustices shaping people’s lives around gender, race, class, queerness, disability—and I also knew in my bones that we could build something different, together.
I’m now an executive leadership coach with 20 years' experience inside fast-growing startups and mission-driven orgs in San Francisco, where I helped build systems, strategy, and teams across operations, HR, brand, marketing, and communications. I’ve advised CEOs and senior leaders responsible for teams of six to nearly 2,000, making and influencing decisions that directly impacted staff and culture.
Along the way, I saw patterns that most leadership development doesn’t name.
I witnessed how urgency, martyrdom, and unexamined power—hello, white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy!—distort work culture and impact, and how leaders, especially women and femmes, are expected to absorb pressure, override their bodies, and carry responsibility far beyond what’s sustainable. When leaders are unsupported, those conditions get passed downstream.
My coaching blends strategy, systems thinking, and mindful somatic psychology, which means I work at the level where leadership actually happens: in how pressure is held in the body, how influence moves across teams, and how people experience you in the room. My training includes deep attention to identity and social location, and my anti-racist work has been lived, relational, and ongoing: rooted in tracking power, repairing harm when it occurs, and supporting leadership practices that do not reproduce it.
I work with women & femme leaders because too many are expected to exhaust themselves to prove their commitment.
I help them build capacity instead—because sustaining yourself inside this work is a crucial part of honoring your mission.
WORKING TOGETHER
Executive Leadership Coaching (1:1)
6 to 12 months of strategic partnership and individualized support.
As your strategic thought partner, this container creates the space and depth required to transform how you carry pressure, become bolder and more innovative, and elevate how your leadership is experienced across your organization.
I partner with directors, EDs and CEOs to:
-
Establish clear performance expectations and accountability systems
-
Lead effective, grounded performance conversations
-
Improve staff retention and team alignment
-
Prepare for board meetings with clarity and authority
-
Translate the strategic plan into executable quarterly priorities
-
Navigate high-stakes conversations without reactivity or shutdown
The engagement includes:
-
One kick-off goal-setting session (75 minutes)
-
Twelve 1:1 coaching sessions (60 minutes each)
-
360° stakeholder interviews (staff, peers, board) with synthesis report
-
Enneagram assessment + 60-minute integration session
-
Ongoing email support between sessions
In our sessions we:
-
Clarify what truly matters this quarter (or week)
-
Map stakeholder dynamics and power flows
-
Rehearse difficult conversations before they happen
-
Strengthen your nervous system capacity so you lead with steadiness
Six-month minimum | Engagements may be organization-sponsored or privately funded. For privately funded rates, schedule a call with me.
Other Ways to Begin
Not ready for a full engagement? Here are other ways to work together.
New Leader 60-Day Intensive
A four-session 1:1 container designed to work through your leadership transition and create clear forward movement.
If you continue into a six-month engagement within 30 days, this fee is applied toward the larger container.
Real downstream impact
This work is 1:1 but the impact is systemic.
Clients report:
- Stronger delegation and shared leadership
- Healthier, more effective team dynamics
- More creativity and joy across teams
- Improved relationships with staff and board members
Often within the first few months.
Because this work is deep and relational, I work with a small number of leaders at a time and take on new clients selectively.
I’d love to chat with you and hear what feels challenging right now.
SCHEDULE A CALL
"Working with Caitlin made a tangible impact on our organization"
About a year into my role as Executive Director, I was fearful, overwhelmed and under constant pressure—worried about not showing up as my best self 100% of the time, stressed by self-imposed productivity standards, and unable to embrace vulnerability and authenticity with my team. Through working with Caitlin, I was able to get to the psychological and physical roots of that pressure, lifting a huge weight off my shoulders.
I’m now approaching my work from a place of trust in myself and in my team. I can discern what’s truly urgent (and isn’t) without guilt, and I'm more confident in my ability to lead well without stepping into “superhero” or “victim” mode when things get hard.
Working with Caitlin made a tangible impact on our organization: delegation with my leadership team is easier and more effective, and we’re sharing responsibilities and operating with greater trust and grace. I feel supported instead of threatened.
I appreciate Caitlin’s attentiveness to the nuances and sticky aspects of my struggles, really hearing me, and her guidance that balanced comfort with in-depth exploration and encouragement. I’d recommend Caitlin to anyone navigating the complexity of leadership roles—juggling the many levels of responsibility leadership demands is hard! Caitlin brings the joy back to it.
– Consuelo Tupper Hernàndez, Executive Director, La Peña Cultural Center
Read my success story with Consuelo here >
No great leader does it alone.
This work supports you as a change-maker while strengthening the people, relationships, and systems that depend on you. When leaders are empowered to lead well, that difference ripples outward.
Working with me makes it possible to be more present, energized, and inspired, and meet your responsibilities with more capacity and ease.
Curious?
SCHEDULE A CALL