About Laura Deaton

Laura Deaton is a nationally recognized leader and consultant with a reputation as a nonprofit turnaround expert. For the last decade, Laura has leveraged her for-profit business skills and her nonprofit leadership expertise to help struggling nonprofits successfully manage major transitions. In just the last five years, she has guided and led a youth mentoring program from complete program closure to a successful five-county merger, crafted a new vision and redesigned programs for a local women's organization, put a struggling symphony orchestra in the black after years of major deficits, and created the infrastructure to allow a new healthcare center to double the number of patients it serves. In addition to her consulting work, Laura is an adjunct faculty member at Duquesne University's School of Leadership and Professional Advancement.  Building capacity for nonprofit organizations is her both her passion, and her career.

Prior to her consulting practice, Laura served as the Executive Director of Big Brothers Big Sisters of the East Bay (Oakland, CA), where she was responsible for the turnaround of a struggling local youth mentoring organization. During her tenure, she led the agency into merger, and her success was profiled in a feature story in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. The agency is now one of the nation's highest-ranking affiliates, second only to post-Katrina New Orleans in growth of numbers of children served. Laura has also held several other in-house nonprofit leadership roles, including stints as Executive Director of The Arc Hamilton County in Cincinnati, OH, Director of Client Services for Community Gatepath in Burlingame, CA, and Director of Health Communications for the national Glaucoma Research Foundation headquartered in San Francisco, CA. More details about Laura can be found at her Full Glass Consulting website and/or on her LinkedIn profile. She also tweets for us @3rdsect or you can follow her personal tweets @deatweets.

Quote: