DEENA STRATEGIC GROUP · CAPITAL, COMMUNITY AND THE DECISIONS BETWEEN THEM
Money moves through the middle. The numbers may be right. The application may be complete. And the decision may still be wrong.
I have sat on both sides of the table: deciding where money goes, and answering for whether it worked. DSG does two things for institutions. For foundations and allocators, I review how your decisions get made, so the rubric rewards the strongest work, not only the best application. For investors, developers and data centers, I assess the institutional and community conditions around a project before money and goodwill are spent.
Culture trained my eye before institutions trained my language. And whoever pays, the community always gets a voice.
More than $75 million raised across her career. 30+ years. Executive coach. Her clients are executives across the country. Author and speaker.
More than $75 million raised across a 30-year career
Source: Fredericka Wallace Deena, owner-confirmed career record, November 1, 2026.Directed United Way institutional allocations and management assistance for funded agencies, including the decisions when agencies had to close
Source: Fredericka Wallace Deena, owner-confirmed career record, November 1, 2026.Designed the United Way Neighborhood Partnership Center, scaled nationally by United Way of America
Source: Fredericka Wallace Deena, owner-confirmed career record, November 1, 2026.Led a 60-person agency keeping energy assistance running for 75,000 Central Ohio residents through a crisis
Source: Fredericka Wallace Deena, owner-confirmed career record, November 1, 2026.Two-year field study embedded with 25 community-based organizations; the cohort raised more than $5 million
Source: Fredericka Wallace Deena, owner-confirmed career record, November 1, 2026.Prices are listed by buyer. Online prices are fixed. Institutional work is scoped in conversation.
ORGANIZATIONS DOING THE WORK
They get paid to serve your community. Why can't you?
You helped them build their institutions. Now let's help you build yours: contracts, finance and more than one way to get paid.
You get: practical rooms you work through on your own, each ending in finished work.
Price: $149, one time, bought online.
Start with Sustainability in a Box™, $149FOUNDATIONS, FAMILY OFFICES, DONOR-ADVISED FUND ADVISERS
Give the organizations you fund tools they own. You sponsor the seats. They keep their accounts and their data. You see only what they choose to share.
You get: a sponsorship plan, a review of your allocation process if you want one, and two-way reporting agreed in writing. No access to grantee records or health information.
Price: scoped in conversation. No online checkout.
Start a sponsorship conversationHEALTH PLANS, HEALTH SYSTEMS, COMPANIES, INVESTORS
I help you understand who already holds trust, where the plan will meet resistance, and what changes before money and goodwill are spent.
You get: a custom institutional assessment: stakeholder and decision map, risk and opportunity brief, paid local partnership structure.
Price: proposed starting point of $35,000, an estimate confirmed in a written scope. Inquiry only.
Request an assessment conversationFICTIONAL SAMPLES. Names, places and figures below are invented to show format. They are not client work.
FUNDER PROCESS REVIEW · FICTIONAL
What the process says: applicants need two years of audited financials.
What it does: screens out groups with under $500,000 budgets before anyone reads the program.
Recommendation: accept reviewed financials or a fiscal sponsor letter at this stage.
COMMUNITY ENTRY BRIEF · FICTIONAL
Known: a tenant association has met monthly for eleven years.
Unknown: whether the county planning board has heard from them.
Next move: a paid listening session before the public announcement.
CAPITAL PURSUIT BRIEF · FICTIONAL
What strengthens it: attendance records kept for three years.
What could make someone hesitate: no written cost per participant.
Fix before you ask: one page showing your true cost.
We built the system that moves money into communities a long time ago. Government laid the foundation, philanthropy built on top of it, and the rest of us kept building on top of that. Much of it was designed in 1980, out of ideas about other people from 1900. The communities of 2026 are not those communities.
So we keep building on top of what's broken. It's time to say it: we got this wrong 20, 40 years ago. We don't have to apologize for it. Let's just fix it. In 2025, Americans gave $617.2 billion to charity. Impact investors worldwide manage $1.57 trillion. Now go look at the neighborhoods we said we'd change.
We don't fix it because we're afraid. Afraid to sit in the same room and say what's broken. I'm not afraid, and I'm not here to fight anybody. Poverty doesn't care what color you are. It cares about being solved.
Sources: Giving USA 2026 via The NonProfit Times ($617.2 billion given in 2025); GIIN, October 2024 ($1.571 trillion in impact investments).
Community has a goal. Capital has a goal. For forty years they've played tug of war, and a whole industry grew up in the middle to referee it.
That middle built a deficit story to survive. Not a person, a process. It says people are poor, they can't think, they need fixing. No, they don't. The same neighborhoods we call poor have PhDs, business owners and millionaires living in them. Communities were built on cooperation long before a corporation stepped in. What they need is for people to sit down and talk to them like the intelligent people they are. Stop trying to turn them into a laboratory, a classroom, social work 101.
It is not the business of the middle to speak for poverty. The middle has to change. That's my work. And no investment will work just because different people are at the table if we keep the same playbook.
How expensive is the distance between capital and the ground? The outreach that doesn't land. The program from across town copying one that already works down the street. The contract that doesn't renew. The grant that never reaches the people doing the work.
We put a dollar number on it, in your own numbers. Then we close it. No sad stories. Numbers, data and diagrams. We show the Underneath and solve the problems there, because so far we've barely scraped the top.
See the full method
I'm a Black Appalachian woman from Wheeling, West Virginia, and Lebanese food is my soul food. I spent more than thirty years at the table where money gets decided. I have raised more than $75 million across my career. I designed United Way's Neighborhood Partnership Center. I helped build the system I'm asking us to change.
I don't want a left or a right. I want impact.
Honest, without fighting.
Source: Fredericka Wallace Deena, owner-confirmed career record, November 1, 2026.Fredericka Wallace Deena, MPA, CFRE
AboutWhat we are seeing in the money, from Deena Strategic Group.
