Trellis Partners

About

Welcome to Trellis, your partners in stabilizing, strengthening, and scaling nonprofit enterprises.

We believe passionately that the social sector has an urgent and essential role in advancing the common good. Each social enterprise must possess a ready and resilient infrastructure for ongoing effectiveness.

Trellis Partners (re)defines infrastructure to include more than just business systems. A nonprofit enterprise should pay due attention to assure business systems are in alignment with program strategies, culture, and leadership.

Here’s what we bring to make that happen:

WE FACILITATE LEARNING. Change is learning; learning is change. We give teams the context for best practices and create conditions for organizational learning. We utilize adult learning and organization development principles to help teams understand organizational growth and change.

WE’RE PRACTITIONERS WITH UNPARALLELED EXPERIENCE. We are fluent in every department of social enterprises, but we do more than advise. With decades of experience driving positive change across major international and domestic social justice organizations, we bring unmatched expertise to the job.

WE (RE)DEFINE INFRASTRUCTURE. Resilience depends on the effectiveness of an organization’s core, and we assure business systems are in alignment with program strategies, culture, and leaderships. We help teams appreciate that infrastructure is about more than only business systems.

WE BRING COMPASSION TO CHANGE. Change is hard, but that’s not to say it can’t be managed with care. We bring a firm but compassionate approach to our work, preferring to make an inch of positive, sustainable progress per month than a foot of forced change.

But we know that building resilience and increasing effectiveness requires grit and a strong support system. That’s why we’re gathering the best of the best.

Are you ready to advance real change?

Founder + CEO

Anna Prow

Practitioner with intellectual chops. Collaborative mentor and advisor. Educator committed to organizational learning. Serious executive balanced by compassion and humor. Systems thinker with a growth mindset.

It is Anna’s unmatched experience and unrelenting belief in the power of our nonprofit sector that led her to found Trellis Partners to help nonprofits achieve strength from change and growth.

In notable executive positions with Center for American Progress, National Democratic Institute, Health Care Without Harm/Practice Greenhealth, Friends of the Earth US, the Enough Project at New Venture Fund, and Campaign Legal Center — as well as a volunteer leader for the Human Rights Campaign — Anna has partnered with pre-eminent civil society leaders to take their organizations to next level excellence.

She brings pedagogy and adult learning experience from career chapters as a public high school English teacher and corporate trainer for Anheuser-Busch. Anna served as a teacher trainer Peace Corps Volunteer and then as an academic director of School for International Training’s study abroad program, both in Madagascar. Her experience overseas also developed her as a cross-cultural communicator and helped her be resourceful and comfortable in any environment.

Anna finds opportunity in uncertainty. She provides constancy by ensuring succession plans so teams can sustain best practices that work for them. Most often described as candid, trustworthy, and kind, Anna has made it her life’s work to see that social enterprises possess the resilience to deliver maximum results.