A Practice Built on Decades of Experience.
Welcome to the Website of Hunter Consulting, LLC
My name is David Hunter and Hunter Consulting LLC is the context within which I have provided consultation services to the nonprofit and public sectors in the USA, northern Europe, and Israel.
This website is dedicated to all the people who work in and on behalf of not-for-profit organizations – both large and small – that seek to make the world better and more sustainable. Due to my background and interests, its focus is on the social service sector. In this sector organizations work incredibly hard in myriad ways, and often under terribly taxing circumstances, to help people who are structurally disadvantaged, marginalized, and/or disabled improve their current lives and circumstances as well as the futures to which they aspire for themselves and their children.
Unfortunately, these organizations generally are under-resourced and constantly buffeted by often capricious and unreasonable demands made by funders. Few are able to build their capacities to deliver highly effective services consistently, reliably, at high levels of quality, and sustainably. Those of us who are their consultants need to understand the forces that keep them in this regrettable state where their ambitions routinely exceed their competencies, their imaginations exceed their results. And we owe it to them – and even more so to the people who turn to them for help and support – to engage with these organizations in ways that are practical and can be held accountable to actually succeed in helping our clients develop crucial capacities and competencies with which to achieve intended results for and with the recipients of their services and/or participants in their programming. At the same time, we need to advocate for rational funding and contracting practices by government, foundations, corporate sponsors and donors so that the endemic hollowing out of nonprofit service providers stops — and is replaced by investments in the resources that nonprofits need in order to drive their programs and services to high levels of quality and effectiveness.
As of the beginning of 2016 I retired from my consulting work. There are some encouraging movements afoot in the nonprofit sector, most conspicuously the Leap of Reason (LOR) Ambassadors Community and their work on the Performance Imperative, with which I will remain involved – check it out at http://leapofreason.org/performance-imperative/. I hope that the contents of my website will complement the efforts of the LOR community and offer useful resources to service providers, their funders, and social policy makers who are invested in building up and supporting a vibrant and effective social sector that delivers what it promises and more often than not succeeds in helping the people it serves.