I started Tim Shaw & Associates to help you connect big thinking with solid planning, implementation, and management. I teach, facilitate and work with you to create systems and processes proven to collaboratively generate big ideas, and then implement, scale and sustain them.

Soon after I started doing this work as a young do-gooder, I realized that most of my colleagues were like me: 90% motivated compassion, 5% white-knuckling fear and 5% professional preparation. None of us majored in “Nonprofit Management” in college.

So…I made up my own rules as I moved from leadership positions in poverty and homeless services to education and grantmaking. Over the years, I developed principles, mental models, systems and processes known only to myself and the wonderful staff and Board members I’d been privileged to serve with over the years.

Until 2007.

Having served as the CEO of the Irvine Public Schools Foundation for six years, I was ready to move on. We’d built IPSF into the largest public school foundation in California and one of the biggest in the country, and along the way, developed a model for public school philanthropy that many wanted to emulate. I was being inundated with requests to teach others what I’d learned.

I’ve been fortunate to have access to the expertise of amazing mentors throughout my career, and I felt a strong desire to pay that forward; to create a resource where you could get the real story…not just theory or conjecture…but practical, honest, brutal truth about this sector we inhabit, and how to engage and navigate it. So, I founded this consulting firm for you…to help you achieve your highest aspirations.