I built Pollen because the organizations doing the hardest community work deserved better financial tools.

I didn't set out to build a consulting firm. I set out to solve a problem I kept seeing, and couldn't stop seeing.

Over twenty years working at the intersection of municipal finance, corporate finance, and the nonprofit sector, I sat in a lot of rooms where serious decisions were being made with the wrong tools. Not because the people in those rooms weren't smart or didn't care. They cared deeply. But caring deeply and modeling accurately are two different things, and I kept watching the gap between them swallow organizations whole.

What I Saw

I watched a theater company buy a building it couldn't afford, anchored to a revenue plan built on subleasing space to other cultural organizations at market-rate rent. It sounded reasonable on paper. It fell apart on contact with reality, because cultural organizations don't pay market-rate rent, and the ones who might aren't looking for a subtenant relationship with a peer. The loan their nonprofit bank partner provided carried debt service higher than the annual salary of the organization's own executives. They were servicing debt before they could pay themselves. That's not a cash flow problem. That's a structural impossibility that should have been caught before closing.

I watched organizations led by visionaries, genuinely brilliant, deeply mission-driven people, set out to build something different. To pay every employee a living wage. A corporate wage. To prove that a nonprofit didn't have to mean undervalued and underpaid. The vision was right. The math wasn't there yet. And without a model that could show them the revenue scale required to sustain that compensation structure, the dream accelerated faster than the funding base could follow. Some of the most promising organizations I've seen collapsed not from lack of ambition, but from ambition that wasn't tethered to a financial reality that could hold it.

I watched an affordable housing developer keep building, not because the community need was there, not because the pipeline made sense, but because the developer fees generated by new construction were the only mechanism keeping their existing financial obligations afloat. Growth as a survival strategy. It works until it doesn't, and when it stops working, everything stops at once.

Why Pollen

These weren't failures of vision. They were failures of infrastructure: the absence of a financial partner willing to tell the truth early enough for it to matter.

That's what I kept coming back to. Big dreams and creative leaders deserve more than cheerleaders. They deserve a partner who will root them to reality, not to shrink the vision, but to build a foundation underneath it that can actually hold the weight.

So I built Pollen. The premise is simple, even if the work isn't: mission-driven organizations deserve the same financial rigor that a hospital system or a major real estate developer brings to a capital decision. Not a cheaper version of it. Not a condensed weekend version of it. The real thing, built around how nonprofits actually generate revenue, manage risk, and sustain operations across funding cycles that don't behave like commercial ones.

How I Work

I work directly with every client. That's not a marketing line: it's a structural choice. I've seen what happens when the senior person sells the engagement and a junior team delivers it. The institutional knowledge doesn't transfer. The judgment doesn't transfer. So I lead and deliver every project myself, and when the work calls for additional expertise, I bring in people from a trusted network whose work I know and stand behind personally.

I'm based in Saint Paul. I'm a woman-owned small business. And I started Pollen because I believed, and still believe, that the organizations holding communities together deserve a partner who will tell them the truth, protect the dream, and build the numbers that make it last.