Deena Strategic Group · 12 years · Working nationally
This page isn't for everyone.
It's for people who are done funding symptoms and ready to fix what's underneath.
- Organizations rooted in their communities, whether that community is a place or a people, that know they deserve to be funded, and paid.
- Small and family foundations that know money isn't a relationship, and know their legacy can change the world.
- Investors, developers and companies who value community, want their projects welcomed, not fought, and are willing to go back to the starting place to get it right.
What we do: we make sure the money reaches the work, and the work gets paid.
Start a consulting inquiryStart here for $149See the seven ways to hire us
Capital. Community. Strategy. Each beam rests on the next. Remove one and the frame falls.
Consulting · Our primary work · 12 years
The middle is not neutral. Neither are we.
Between the community and the decision there's a middle: the paperwork, the go-betweens, the rules nobody explains. It decides who gets funded long before anyone reads the work.
For 12 years, Deena Strategic Group has worked inside that middle for every side of the table. Hire us to redesign it: for your organization, your foundation, or the project you're bringing into a neighborhood.
Capital Strategy & Fundraising
Major grants, capital plans and revenue that doesn't depend on one funder.
How we do itOperations Backbone
The paperwork that keeps you legal, funded and calm.
How we do itPrograms, Networks & Hubs
Many organizations, one working system, every identity intact.
How we do itSystems, Data & Measurement
Shared measures, 60-day learning cycles and data people will actually collect.
How we do itCommunications & Capital Readiness
Quarterly funder briefs, a case study, a pitch kit and a legacy case.
How we do itHealthcare Investor Community Delivery
Market entry, delivery, implementation and evaluation for healthcare capital.
How we do itData Center Community Entry
Land history, kinship networks, power and paid community partners. Not PR.
How we do it
Organizations · Foundations and donor-advised funds · Healthcare venture and private equity · Senior care · Youth and workforce · Data centers and large technology operators
Every engagement is scoped in writing after a conversation. We don't post consulting prices, because no two rooms are the same.
Start here · $149 · one time
Sustainability in a Box™
When a funder asks how the work keeps going, answer with your real numbers. You enter your costs and hours. You leave with a plan your board and funders can read.
- The full cost of the work, with unpaid labor kept separate from cash
- A revenue mix across more than one source
- Eight saved modules you can stop and come back to
- Two files built from your answers: Sustainability Plan (PDF) and numbers workbook (Excel)
Saved to your account. No subscription. It is not a grant or a contract, and it does not include Medicaid tools.
Same children. Two kinds of tired.
“We serve 500 kids. We got a $3,000 grant.”
“We said no to the program serving 500 kids. The budget came in wrong.”
Neither side knows the other one is tired too. Somewhere in the middle, the reports, the go-betweens and the paperwork make sure they never hear it from each other.
Money without a relationship is just money. We build the line, then we get out of the way.
What we believe
If you believe survivability is a metric, then it belongs in every decision about where money goes.
Every community that made it through something, whether colonization, displacement, a closed plant or a century of being told no, made it through on wisdom. Lessons passed down from the generations about how to take care of each other, how to stretch what little there was, and who to trust before you walk in.
If we had put numbers to that wisdom, the way we put numbers to everything else, we would be further along. But when the wisdom came from people who were Black, or brown, or poor, or different, it was called anecdotal. It didn't get a number, so it didn't get counted. And when the programs were built, they weren't built on it.
We think of a burned community as one that caught fire. That's not the only way. You burn a community by breaking its knowledge trust. Then you say that knowledge never existed. Then you slip something else in its place.
You won't learn this in a social-emotional learning class.
What my grandmother taught me wasn't in those books. It was a voice of expectation, from everyone around us, until it got drowned out.
Now the people who fund impact are asking what's missing. They call it culture. They call it user experience. It's the wisdom they left out.
When you have to survive, you learn how to re-engineer failure. That's the expertise we count, and the expertise we help capital learn to count.
Is this you?
Find the situation that sounds like yours.
Organizations
400 children. $2,000 grants.
You serve 400 children and keep getting $2,000 and $3,000 checks. The work is big. The checks are not.
We find what funders couldn't see, fix what actually needs fixing, and build the capital plan that matches the size of the work.
See Capital StrategyOrganizations
The volunteer director.
You run the whole thing after your day job. No staff. The filing is due, the board needs minutes, and the invoice is still in your head.
We set up the calendar, the board records, the budget and the invoices so the organization runs without you holding it all.
See the Operations BackboneOrganizations
Growing food for veterans.
Like Operation Meraki at The Commons, you grow food for low-income and senior veterans. People eat because of you. You want it paid for, not just praised.
Start with the true cost of the work and every way it could be paid: grants, contracts and, where your state allows, health plans. Food is never automatically billable.
Operation Meraki is named as an example of this kind of work. It is not presented as a client result.
Try the free Medicaid demoCompanies
The data center next door.
You picked a site. The zoning hearing is in 90 days. The people who decide whether this project lives haven't been asked.
We learn the land, the families and institutions that hold the neighborhood, and how decisions really move. Then we bring in paid community partners. Not PR.
See Community EntryFoundations
More than a final report.
You fund good people and hear from them twice a year. You want a relationship, not a beginning, a middle and an end.
Put your questions and dates into the work your grantees already do. They answer in their own words and decide what is shared.
See the relationship system
These describe common situations. They are not client stories, testimonials or results.
Door 1 · For community-based, place-based and identity-based organizations
You deserve to be paid too.
Aren't you tired of getting $3,000 grants while agencies that didn't grow up here raise millions, and you're the one holding the wisdom of neighbors, yesterday and today?
Aren't you tired of being invited to the pep rally, where politicians talk about solving the same problem that has never been fixed? They get reelected. You get the parking fee. I know. I've organized a few of them myself.
Aren't you tired of yet another survey, another report about the unresolved, while you go back home and bury a child or a neighbor?
Aren't you tired of living off scraps, in a grant world that believes you aren't skilled enough to handle its requirements?
Don't you want to know how?
If so, you have found the right page.
They say the people who've lived on the least have no life skills.
You have the most advanced life skills in the country. You know who your friends are before you walk in. You can stretch a dollar, read a room and hold a block together through a plant closing. That was never anecdote. It was data nobody bothered to collect.
We don't teach you how to ask. We teach you how to invoice.
What you can't get off the street
- Get Paid for What You Already Do™Medicaid, contracts and reimbursement for the work you're already doing.
- Program-in-a-Box: Paid Reentry EmploymentFund it before you buy it. You end with a running, paid program.Proposed $250 · not on sale yetComing soon. Get on the list.
- Sustainability in a Box™Stay funded after the check clears.$149Buy now
- Ask a HumanA senior strategist when you're stuck.By inquiryAsk about it
Start with Sustainability in a Box™: $149, one time. Your room opens once your payment is confirmed and you sign in.
Door 2 · For family foundations, donors and donor-advised funds
Due diligence should not get in the way of knowing the people doing the work.
Aren't you tired of saying no to organizations you want to fund, because you're careful and accountable with your family's legacy?
Aren't you tired of a relationship that's a midterm report, a final report, and that's it?
Aren't you tired of an impact report with numbers from someone you only know by the faces on the front cover?
That might have worked in the 1930s. In 2027, we have to know each other, and understand each other's gates, real or otherwise.
If so, you have found the right page.
You don't have to say no to the one serving 500 kids.
Build the questions you most want answered right into the system: your ten questions, your deadlines, your surveys. Every organization you fund agrees to use it with you. They answer in their own words, from the work they're already doing, and they decide what's shared.
Ten questions instead of two reports. A relationship instead of a file. And no staff needed to pull it together.
What you can't get off the street
- Philanthropy Sustainability Relationship SystemYour questions, milestones and calendar, built into the work your grantees already do. Setup and help desk available. In pilot.By inquiryDesign your pilot
- Founding pilotTen grantees, one full cycle.By inquiryAsk about the pilot
- Allocations DesignYour values say one thing and your process says another. When we're done, the process says it too.By inquiryAsk about it
Door 3 · For investors, developers, data centers and companies
There's a whole structure out there you haven't been introduced to.
Aren't you tired of running a community process through organizations that aren't connected to the ground, and losing revenue while you figure it out?
Aren't you tired of a community meeting where the people in the room aren't the people who decide whether your project lives?
Aren't you tired of a partner who can get you a photo op but not a yes?
For healthcare venture and private equity, senior care, youth and workforce companies, and data center and large technology operators. This is not public relations. We bring in paid community partners and the truth about the place.
If so, you have found the right page.
$68 billion
in data center projects blocked or delayed by local opposition in the second quarter of 2026 alone
Before you walk in, know who your friends are. The block club president. The pastor. The woman everybody calls before they call 911. That's a survival skill, and the people we come from have had to practice it all their lives.
Let us teach you how to make friends.
What you can't get off the street
- Good Neighbor™How to enter a community the right way, and earn a real yes.By inquiryAsk about it
- Community conditions reviewLand, history, local expectations and the people affected, before commitments become expensive mistakes. Including what a community benefit fund should actually pay for.By inquiryAsk about it
Whose voice you're following · Founder & Principal
Fredericka Wallace Deena. Black and Appalachian. Thirty years inside the rooms where money gets decided.
Senior VP of Development. Designer of United Way's Neighborhood Partnership Center, a national model. More than $75 million raised. I've sat at the allocations table, run the agency in crisis, and organized the rally. I know what each of those rooms keeps missing.
“If we're ever going to make real impact, we have to start talking. We have to start listening to each other.”
Fredericka Wallace Deena, Founder
We are a tribe.
Deena Strategic Group is made up of senior professionals from philanthropy, technology and banking. We've reached the point in our careers where we're comfortable enough to rattle a tree when that's what it takes. And we all believe the same thing: communities have to be known, paid and in the room.
Senior Advisor · Technology & Community Systems
Kimberly Allen Davis
Master's degrees in social work and technology.
Wherever you are
Whatever land your community stands on. Whatever language your grandmother spoke at the table. Whoever you love. Wherever you served.
And if your community sits where two of those meet, where most funding falls through the cracks, that's exactly where we work.
We've been in rooms like yours. When we haven't, we bring someone who has: a senior consultant who knows your community from the inside, not one who studied it.
Capital Signal · the whole thing, not the pieces
Some things you have to read whole.
Fairness isn't always cutting the truth into bite-sized pieces. Sometimes it's handing you the whole thing and trusting you to think about it. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Every claim is one we can prove.
Capital Signal
What we are seeing in the money, from Deena Strategic Group.