Jill Blair

Founding principal of BTW informing change, Jill is now an independent consultant based in Seattle.  She is well known for her work with philanthropies and nonprofits on local and national issues of strategy and organizational health.

While at BTW, Jill served as an advisor to the Tides Center executive team to help frame and prepare the Center's new business strategy. She also facilitated an inquiry and development process for the Educational Network (EdNet) of KQED public broadcasting in San Francisco.

In collaboration with former BTW Principal Fay Twersky, Jill designed an iterative, time-limited theory-of-change process to help projects and organizations align intentions and impact. The process calls on projects to reflect on and clarify their purpose, strategies and targets of change. The result is a final graphic and narrative product used by organizations to guide practice and evaluation. BTW continues to employ a variation of this process with its clients today.

Jill is lead author of dozens of reports and articles, and co-author of a chapter entitled “Performance Information That Really Performs” in the book Strategic Tools for Social Entrepreneurs. She has a passion for providing local and national organizations with consulting support on issues of strategy and leadership.

Jill serves on the board of directors of The Whitman Institute, a San Francisco–based foundation. The Institute funds global organizations and individuals to promote a more peaceful and sustainable world through respectful dialogue, critical thinking and vibrant citizen engagement. She is also on the board of the Seattle CityClub, dedicated to building understanding, engagement and community leadership

Shiree Teng

Shiree is a seasoned leader with a lifelong commitment to social change. She has more than 25 years’ experience designing and managing collaborative efforts and building lasting relationships in the nonprofit sector. She believes that when groups come together, they can design powerful solutions to social challenges.

Shiree has an intimate understanding of the issues and challenges related to diversity and cultural competence, the non-profit sector, capacity building, foundation decision-making and foundation culture. She leads by serving, using a culturally based approach and relying on core competencies: strategic thinking, listening and synthesizing, connecting and mobilizing action.

For the past 10 years, Shiree has worked as a program officer and consultant to the Packard Foundation’s Organizational Effectiveness program. She is also a member of the national consultant pool for the French American Charitable Trust’s Management Assistance Program. She has worked on the evaluation and capacity building teams for the Hewlett Foundation’s Neighborhood Improvement Initiative, and is the lead evaluator for NCDI’s five-year capacity building effort funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

Shiree serves on the boards of Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and LeaderSpring, an executive-director fellowship program. In 2008, She received the Alliance of Nonprofit Management “Capacity Builder of the Year” award and served on the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations Conference Planning Committee.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Shiree is fluent in three Chinese dialects and has a functional understanding of Spanish from having lived and worked with cannery and farm workers in Watsonville and Salinas. She holds degrees in Social Welfare and Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in the Fruitvale District in Oakland with her partner, two of three sons and two shepherd-mutt dogs.

Fay Twersky

A BTW co-founder, Fay was recruited by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006. At the Gates Foundation, she developed and led their Impact Planning & Improvement team—developing a strategy lifecycle process that enabled grantmaking teams to engage in clear problem-identification and strategy development within a continuous learning and improvement framework.

Fay left her Gates Foundation post in 2010 when she was invited to Israel to serve as a Senior Advisor to the Director General of Yad Hanadiv—the Rothschild Family Foundation, based in Jerusalem.  Her work with Yad Hanadiv was primarily to advise on issues of strategy development and measurement but during her tenure, she assumed the additional responsibility of serving as Co-Chief Programme Officer—supervising the programme team and leading the Programme Director Forum.

In the fall of 2011 Fay returns to the United States to work with Paul Brest, President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as a Senior Fellow. In this one-year post Fay will offer advice and support to the foundation’s teams related to refining and consolidating its measurement efforts.  She will also consult on a variety of topics related to the practice of philanthropy overall.