Consulting services
Engage Winona’s consulting services are a one-stop-shop for engagement solutions. We connect organizations with the communities, participants, and stakeholders they serve to take on challenges, get honest input on strategic initiatives and projects, communicate information to create shared understanding, and co-create ideas and solutions. We bring communities together in innovative, creative and productive ways, reaching far beyond the usual suspects to generate involvement from a wide array of community members.
Our consulting work has spanned organizations and community groups throughout the Winona area and across the state, with a strong focus on promoting opportunities for everyone. We specialize in three key areas:
Internal Organizational Development: We support organizations in deepening their community engagement and fostering a culture of co-ownership that centers lived experience leadership.
Facilitating Collaboration for Collective Impact: We bring together cross-sector strategic planning and problem-solving groups with inclusive processes that center equity.
Designing Equitable Structures: We create innovative frameworks that enable organizations to connect meaningfully with the communities they serve to share power and collaborate on challenges, opportunities, and programs.
Change making, power shifting. We are committed to implementing trauma-informed and equitable practices in a way that resonates with our diverse political landscape. Our consulting work has empowered organizations and local governments to engage meaningfully with individuals with lived experience. We’ve trained community members in community practice, assisted regional cultural institutions in enhancing visitor engagement, and facilitated task forces and coalitions addressing complex challenges, among other initiatives.
Specific to the area. Engage Winona has deep roots here, meaning we understand networks, politics, histories, relationships, and other factors that influence community work.
Facilitation experts. Our staff is trained in convergent facilitation, community co-design, and other equity-focused and person-centered facilitation methods. We can assist you with strategic planning and visioning, board and leadership development, design of programs and services, conflict management, community organizing workshops, and more. Our work and process is co-created by the communities and organizations we collaborate with.
Training and workshop services
In addition to custom consulting work, we also offer a-la-carte workshops for organizations and teams. If you’d like a training that’s not on the list, please reach out for a custom solution!
Introduction to community engagement tools, 2 hrs, $1,000 base price for up to 20 participants
Supporting employees with lived experience, 2 hrs, $1,000 base price for up to 20 participants
Inclusive leadership practices, 2 hrs, $1,000 base price for up to 20 participants
Selected clients
Engagement solutions
Minnesota Marine Art Museum — Art is For Everyone: Welcoming local audiences into the museum by addressing barriers and co-creating special events and activities
Winona State University — Community outreach and visioning for a proposed athletic and regional events center
Saint Mary’s University Page Theatre — Strengthening campus and community audiences, creating local collaborations for arts programming
Winona County Historical Society — Collaborating with the community to co-create stories, exhibits, and interactive features for a reimagined main exhibit hall
Facilitation and project management solutions
City of Winona Alternative Response Group – Facilitating a stakeholder group through conflict to develop a shared vision and consensus around creating a crisis response team to provide a complement to policing.
Minnesota Presenters Network – Building collaborative networks, defining strategic advocacy roles in state policymaking for a statewide group of arts and culture presenters
City of Winona – Self-Change For Collective Transformation, an immersive inner work and inclusive civic engagement program for a cohort of emerging leaders
Women’s Resource Center – Building board capacity, visioning collaborative programming to meet changing needs
Home and Community Options – Interactive workshop to create collective leadership and self-healing skills for full-time staff amid organizational change
Winona Fine Arts Commission – Reimagining and visioning roles and capacities in championing arts and culture initiatives
Testimonials
“(Engage Winona) has forever changed the way I will think about community engagement. We learned so much through working with EW that I am still digesting it all. The final report was so beautiful, comprehensive, and useful that we will refer to it for years to come.” — Heather Casper, Minnesota Marine Art Museum
“Working with Engage Winona helped us to reach more people throughout the community. Instead of our typical participants or demographic, the project went beyond our ‘same old, same old.’” — Malia Fox, Winona Friendship Center
“Our work with Engage Winona dramatically impacted our ability to incorporate community needs and interests into our programming process. Because we have a very small staff and limited capacity, Engage Winona was instrumental in gathering the information we never would have been able to gather on our own.” — Theresa Remick, Saint Mary’s University Page Theatre
Contact
Our work and services are limited only by creative thinking; we’re always happy to sit down for a free consultation and talk through how we may be able to help.
Contact: engage@engagewinona.org | 507-312-9133