Hi, I’m Sonja.
I wanted to be a diplomat, to “make the world a better place”. Got into Oxford and everything.
Fifteen years later, I'm in a café in Dominica, about as far from a UN negotiating room as you can get, helping a grassroots NGO figure out why their programme that's clearly making a difference can't get funded. It's not the work. It's that the funder wants a 15-page report built for an organisation with a monitoring and evaluation department, and this one has three overworked volunteers.
That gap between what funders ask for and what's actually possible or useful is where my consulting practice sits.
For over a decade, I was in International NGO Headquarters roles: reporting on a $22 million USAID programme, and building the evidence for over thirty UK-government-funded democracy projects. I know what makes those funders request 20 complicated indicators from you, and I’ve been up at 11 pm fixing spreadsheet errors.
At the same time, I live in Dominica in the Caribbean and work directly with local NGOs - not parachuting in as "the international expert," but embedded as an extra pair of hands. I've helped volunteer-run teams doing extraordinary work on almost no budget win grants from the Canadian Government and the EU, and convince corporate sponsors.
Here's what that's taught me:
Most of what passes for accountability in this sector is theatre.
Reports written to please, not prove impact. Frameworks that measure what's easy to count, not what actually counts. Workshops that perform capacity-building without building anything.
I'm not interested in helping you perform better theatre. I'm interested in helping you build evidence that's useful to you first, the kind that tells you what's working, gives you room to adapt when it isn't, and still satisfies the funder.
There is a way to have the evidence you need, and not lose sleep over it.
That's what I do now: hands-on coaching and consulting for teams who need to build this properly, and a growing library of funder-specific tools so you can build it yourself.
Not sure where to start? Take this quiz to find out what kind of funder you're actually dealing with, and download the free Cheat Sheet at the end.
Or book a free call and we'll figure it out together.
