Fieldstone Consulting, Inc. customizes assignments to each institution's special needs and desires.

A Sampling of Recent Assignments:

Higher Education

• Over a period of two years, beginning with the board of trustees and then adding in senior management and faculty, helped guide planning work with an independent Midwestern university.
• Assisted a large community college district with the definitional and governance challenges posed by changing economic and demographic circumstances. The structure that had worked well 20 years earlier had come to create unfortunate and unnecessary friction.
• Completed a year-long governance study of a religiously affiliated institution wishing to move beyond adversarial to synergistic governance structures. Extensive interviews, careful review of governance documents, and multiple sessions with the board and its governance committee resulted in new bylaws, procedures, and internal structures.
• Returned to a graduate school intent on incorporating recent institutional and educational progress into its strategic plan.
• Worked with the president and board of a large state university that had, without fully realizing it, completed a 15-year-long "agenda" and also was, without understanding so, seeking a new vision to lead them forward once again. A retreat with board and cabinet, and then one with well over 125 constituents, led to rapid production and approval of the basis of a new strategic plan. Additional campus input followed.
• Helped another state university identify its desired role within the context of its state's weakly-defined higher education structure. Generating its own shared, sharp vision released new energies and focus – and new ways to collaborate with peer institutions.
• Returned 13 years after a workshop that had set the agenda for an independent university's new president and board. That workshop, in turn, had led to a series of strategic plans. This year, looking to the retirement of its enormously successful president, the board of this transformed university reflected on the institutional needs sure to arise during its next presidency and the kind of individual most suited to address them.

K-12 Independent Schools

• Assessed the history and performance of an old and valued regional day school that was grappling with shifting demographics and ways to measure success. The task was to sharpen its direction and provide the resources necessary to reach new goals.
• Entered into a coaching relationship with a distinguished school head beginning at a new school.
• Helped a growing boarding school recognize the potential for growth that lay within its existing mission – and the ways it best could seize the multiple opportunities before it. What had seemed constraints really were invitations to greatly expanded service.
• Reviewed with the board of a well-established elementary school the last two decades of its history and the special openings a new head now provided.
• Worked with a thriving elementary school unnecessarily uncertain of its identity, but, in fact, projecting a sharp image and filling a genuine niche in the market.
• In the course of a week of interviews and a day-long community retreat, assembled the data required for a thriving international school in Europe to lay out its plan for the next five years.

Other organizations

• For the Democratic and Republican leadership of the U. S. House of Representatives, led — with Richard Shapiro, long a consultant to Congress — the first comprehensive assessment of the two-century-old House Page Program. Extensive interviews, special studies, and surveys all figured within the study.
• For the association of board chairs of Spanish universities (Conferencia de Consejos Sociales de Universidades Españolas), delivered an address (Cordoba) on best practice in university governance. The theme was the under-recognized distinctiveness of American university boards: They stand beyond their constituencies and politics and, so, can identify with strong chief executives the directions in which they want their institutions to advance. Spain's ancient tradition of lay boards opened significant opportunities for the association's development and its service to national institutions of higher education.
• For a state association of technical college presidents and board members, facilitated a day-long workshop on best practice in presidential assessment.
• For the recently restructured American affiliate of an international research foundation, assisted in defining appropriate roles and possibilities.
• For an international foundation, provided guidance to a graduate fellow examining best ways to restructure higher education in Mongolia.