Selected engagement
Arts & Culture NonprofitMergers & IntegrationMerger Integration Advisor + Executive Facilitator
I was brought in after the merger had legally closed but before the combined organization had any shared sense of itself. Over the course of the engagement I led listening work across staff, artists, and community members, facilitated employee-led working groups, and guided the executive team and board to a single direction the whole organization could recognize.
The turning point
They had completed the merger on paper. What they had not done, what no one had done, was decide who they were now.
Two organizations with distinct histories, loyal stakeholders, and decades of separate culture were operating under one roof and one name. The legal work was finished. The organizational work had barely started.
The turning point was not the merger itself. It was the gap between a completed transaction and a shared identity, and the fact that the gap was widening quietly while everyone stayed busy.
What was at stake
My role
I was brought in to help the combined organization decide who it had become, and to build a direction that the people living inside it would actually carry.
That meant serving as both advisor to the executive team and facilitator of the work itself, including the conversations that were too charged for an internal leader to run.
How I approached the work
Before any conversation about direction, I needed an honest picture of where the organization stood. I listened to employees, artists, and community members about what they were carrying into work every day. What surfaced was not chaos. It was something more specific: two different stories about what mattered.
Rather than drafting language for staff to react to, I designed structured listening sessions and employee-led working groups. The people inside the organization already understood the turning point more clearly than the executive team had realized. My job was to give that understanding a structure it could travel through.
Not "what should we say about ourselves," but "what are we actually willing to commit to becoming?" That reframing is what moved the work from messaging to decision-making, and it is why the result was not a compromise between two cultures but something new that honored both.
The direction was sequenced so that each decision was carried by the group that would own it: employees authored identity language, the leadership team set priorities, and the board affirmed the strategy. Nothing arrived as a surprise.
The work
Listening across the combined organization
Interviews and structured sessions with employees, artists, and community members to establish current reality.
Employee-led working groups
Facilitated groups that authored a DEIB statement in their own words rather than adopting either legacy organization's language.
Identity and strategy definition
Facilitated sessions producing mission, vision, values, and four strategic pillars with the leadership team.
Board affirmation and rollout
Carried the work to the board and supported publication and organization-wide communication.
What changed
Tangible outputs
Organizational shifts
The takeaway
A merger can be legally complete long before people experience themselves as one organization. Integration begins when leaders are willing to address the questions that structure alone cannot answer.
Cecilia Stanton Adams
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