Are you exceptionally clear about why you exist and what is important about how you do your work? Let Heather facilitate your board conversation with five key questions that will illuminate the path forward.
Boards can make an important contribution to the strategic planning process--yet the amount of involvement varies from ministry to ministry. Allow Heather to come alongside the board to facilitate this important process.
Ministry evaluation is the practice of reflecting on how well you are accomplishing your mission. Heather moves beyond traditional quantitative metrics and facilitates a rich conversation to develop evaluation criteria, indicators, and a monitoring process appropriate for your ministry context.
Whether your board policies need a tune-up or you are starting from scratch, Heather will create a board policy manual customized to your context, providing training and support as required.
Sometimes stepping into the board chair role can feel daunting, but it doesn't need to be that way! Heather provides orientation and coaching for new board chairs that sets them on the path to effectiveness quickly.
Is your board regularly evaluating how well it is governing? Let Heather set up a streamlined, yet effective process that focuses on key board practices.
What would it look like to conduct a performance review of the pastor or ministry leader in a way that honours Christ? Heather works with the board and ministry leader to set out a mutually respectful process as well as clear evaluation criteria.
Heather can also design custom facilitation and board retreats for your ministry. Contact her to have a complimentary conversation about your needs.
If you don't see what your looking for, please reach out to discuss specific needs and custom solutions.
"It has been a privilege to work with Heather. Her great expertise in various domains (finances, HR, strategy, governance, coaching…) have been instrumental to manage an important transition in our church. Her interpersonal skills and strong personal maturity make her a very effective communicator with a lot of doigté, tact and some aplomb when needed."
" I can’t recommend Heather enough! She has walked our board and governance committee through implementing our policy governance model. She has taken us from a place of fast growth with confusion in governance to a place of clarity and strategic thinking so we can be even more effective at our mission. She is professional, highly skilled, leads with a servant’s heart and works with us in each step of the change management."
“PAN really needed to do the work of clarifying our mission, what ministries would receive our focus, and what policies we needed to create and update. You are empowering ministries with this really important work you are doing. It is allowing us to return our attention to ministry engagement."
"Heather was an immense blessing to my church and leadership team when I was in pastoral ministry. She has great knowledge and experience and was able to contextualize her approach to our own unique church setting."
"Heather's combination of research, best practice, and theological integration provided a rich learning opportunity for our leaders. As well, her online facilitation was engaging and invited participation from those attending."
"Heather's commitment to understanding and serving my organization and its mission was so evident in her preparation, facilitation, and follow up for our board retreat."
" Our ministry team hired Heather to help us transition from a current team structure to one that would position us for future growth. Heather was so wonderful to work with—she listened to understand the DNA of our team and ministry, what our needs were, and helped lead us into a structure that felt like us."
" Working with Heather to establish a board for our church plant has been an absolute joy. Heather is highly skilled, professional, and she understands the unique dynamics of establishing church boards. I look forward to passing her name on to others--Heather is top shelf!"
"Heather possesses a rare combination of character, skills and passion for assisting leaders. I first contracted Heather as a mediator for a church experiencing serious division. Her calm manner, combined with extraordinary insight, produced a favourable resolution in a difficult situation. Subsequently our charity hired Heather as a ministry consultant. With her guidance, our board was able to quickly clarify our options and strategize a path forward. I highly recommend Five Smooth Stones as a valuable leadership resource for charities, churches and Kingdom-minded organizations."
We highly recommend Heather to any organization. Her expertise in governance, experience and insight all converged to create materials and workshops that were exactly tailored to who we are as a ministry. Heather is reassuring to work with, and the outcomes are brilliant.
"Heather was an amazing ally in fostering a shift for our volunteer Council from a "working board" to a "governance board". A clear, kind, and concise communicator, Heather gently nudged things along while hearing and taking on-board concerns and ideas along the way. "
"We engaged Heather Card to help us discover suitable ways of assessing our church’s health and mission as we began a period of transition after the retirement of a long-serving Lead Pastor. Heather brought to us a sensitive, wise, and rich blending of wisdom from Scripture and from the world of organizations and management. This was set in context of a sensitivity that recognized that we ourselves needed to discern God’s voice in our particular setting.
We were impressed with Heather’s ability to listen deeply and to reflect back to us what she had heard, while weaving it into what we still needed to discover for ourselves. Her wisdom is theologically-rooted and organizationally-wise, and in a few short sessions she was able to empower us to move forward in our season of transition."