"Through the strategic planning process, Oscar helped us to identify our weaknesses and to form united solutions to ensure our sustainability, growth, and overall strength in reaching our mission - clean air for Central Valley breathers."

       -Liza Bolaños,

Coordinator,

Central Valley Air Quality Coalition

"Oscar and his team challenged my assumptions, provided me with a boost of creativity and demonstrated a broad expertise in program positioning. I hope to continue working with them as I move from strategic planning to execution."
      - Director,

Professionals for Responsible Supply Management (PRiSM)

In the constantly evolving San Francisco Bay Area it's not always easy to keep your organization positioned at the cutting edge in its field.

Blue Thistle has the expertise to guide and facilitate you and your team as you plan, implement, fund and evaluate programs that can thrive in this competitive environment.

For nineteen years Blue Thistle's founder, Oscar Wolters-Duran, has led organizations in both the non-profit and for-profit sectors. His projects have involved dynamic partnerships with nonprofits, schools, businesses, universities and public agencies.

Strategic Planning
Planning is the key that unlocks the potential of your organization. Our approach helps you get to the heart of your organizational story, to help you develop the narrative you want.

Program and Curriculum Design
Create programs and activities that will efficiently and clearly meet your organization's mission and objectives. We specialize in developing engaging service learning curricula.

Evaluation and Assessment
We can help you effectively measure what's truly important to you, your clients and your funders, and to use evaluation to help you reach your goals.

Sustainability Planning
We focus on developing the compelling story that will serve as the foundation for all fundraising activity. Our team is experienced at guiding fundraising campaigns, identifying and tapping new funding sources, and developing winning materials to support a successful effort.

Communications and Publicity
Once you've developed your organizational story, you're ready to tell that story to the world. Our staff can give you visually exciting, professionally created marketing materials, press kits, and a website that tells your organization's story.

We promise clients:

Creativity: We approach each project with an open mind - no preconceived or packaged solutions. Each organization is completely unique and deserves a custom-made solution.

Integrity: We listen carefully to your needs and then follow through to address them with complete honesty, thoroughness and reliability. If we think something won't work, we'll let you know!

Expertise: We bring all of our knowledge and experience to each project, and when necessary, enlist allied experts to create the best team to meet your needs.

Environmental Care: We consider the environmental impact of our activities, and practice our work in such a way as to limit our negative impact on the Earth.

Please check out my short articles with useful tips, links and examples for non-profit professionals.

Nonprofit Storytelling

In my career, I’ve seen too many grant proposals and strategic plans that look like academic research papers. I’ve been guilty of them myself. While there is a place for lining up rigorous facts and citing all sources, for many documents created by nonprofit organizations, simplicity, directness and the old fashioned art of storytelling are key.

Many years ago I learned about Theory of Change and the Logic Model. What struck most about these frameworks for planning, was that at heart, they were simply about telling a compelling story that made common sense. If a plan doesn’t tell a story about something that is important to us, what’s the point? If it doesn’t satisfy common sense, no indexed tables or spreadsheets full of data can be fully convincing.

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