Rethinking Philanthropy: Funding Systems Change

Vicki is the principal consultant and founder of Prospera Partners, a social-good consulting and facilitation firm that works with localists, small business owners, social entrepreneurs, and nonprofits on thoughtful business planning, systems change, transformational leadership, and more. She is people-centered and passionate about teaching, guiding, and facilitating clients through strategies to do better by doing good – for themselves, their business, and their communities.

At Prospera Partners Vicki designs and facilitates retreats, workshops, and communities of practice that will inspire community leaders and social entrepreneurs for transformational action.  She also works with small business owners and social entrepreneurs to grow programs and businesses with thoughtful, step-by-step localism strategies for success that include marketing, press, and business planning. Her Master of Arts in Theatre Directing, training in the Art of Hosting and World Café methods of facilitation, and early days as a theatrical director, playwright, and an activist performer (no, really!) help Vicki bring humor, heart, and actionable tasks to anything she designs or leads.

When she’s not consulting or facilitating on all things local (and transforming leaders and businesses to do social good) she’s speaking or blogging about it. Her articles have appeared in publications like The Nonprofit Quarterly, Green Fire Times, Philanthropy Journal and others, and she has given keynotes and presentations across the country on everything from local economies to healthy food systems and more. 

Before founding Prospera Partners Vicki served as the executive director of the Santa Fe Independent Business Alliance, where it grew to become one of the largest local economy business networks in the US, with a successful and award-winning Farm to Restaurant Project that impacted the local community for lasting economic change, and as a fellow for the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). Other honors include being named Young Careerist, a 40 under Forty Business Executive designation by New Mexico Business Weekly, and serving on Santa Fe’s City Business and Quality of Life Committee, the City of Albuquerque’s Living Cities Leadership Team, and Santa Fe’s Catalyzing Jobs Committee. Vicki is a current Advisory Board Member of Design Corps Santa Fe and the Hispanic-American Institute.

As a writer, activist, and social justice educator, Kourtney has trained hundreds of people on violence prevention, pro-feminism, and environmental justice. He currently works for the Upaya Zen Center, a Zen Buddhist community that is focused on the integration of practice and social action. Prior to this role he served for several years as the Works Manager for the Santa Fe Art Institute. 

As a former board member of Veterans For Peace, he led membership recruitment efforts, served on the executive committee and led convention workshops. At the University of Missouri-Columbia, Kourtney co-advised a male ally program and sexual violence prevention student organization, and assisted with implementing a comprehensive bystander intervention program. After having worked as an office administrator for the Center for Social Justice, Kourtney lead the People of Color Caucus with Fertile Ground Institute, worked as the administrative assistant for Culture Reframed – a leading NGO educating on commercial sexual exploitation – and was a featured speaker at the 2014 Earth At Risk: The Justice & Sustainability Conference. 

Kourtney is a published author and his articles are available on several activist websites. He grew up in Illinois, served five years in the Army National Guard, and moved to Santa Fe with his wife in July 2016.

As an alum of Prospera Partners’ Emerging Social Sector Leaders who went on to become an Associate Facilitator for the program, Eileen has experienced first hand how social impact can be made through systems change while learning, dreaming, growing, and being in community. She brings two decades of experience in the social sector, a unique skill set working across multiple sectors, and education background to her consulting and facilitation work. As the Chief Transformation Officer for Prospera Partners, she handles business development and systems change consulting and facilitation for the company.

Eileen first began the journey into systems thinking and interconnectedness when she studied human ecology in the late 1990s, identifying the critical need for water in the Rio Grande for humans along with natural and built systems. From there, she went on to get an MS in Wildlife Science from NMSU, applying that knowledge to several years as a field biologist across New Mexico. During this time, she began seeing that land, wildlife, and water conservation are all dependent on people and made the switch to working with youth and adults through outdoor and environmental learning two decades ago. Since then, she has worked in and adjacent to New Mexico’s education system, having personally taught over 25,000 youth across the state. 

Most recently, Eileen served as executive director where she built one of the largest capacity outdoor learning networks in the country serving over 150 organizations that support 285,000 New Mexican youth annually. During the six years in this role, Eileen tripled the operating budget, increased staff capacity fourfold, advanced state level policy in outdoor learning, and created a variety of new programs including the first fellowship program of its kind supporting interconnected interests like environmental justice, conservation, outdoor recreation, and outdoor learning and education in many forms. 

Eileen is an ongoing student of embodied social justice and has worked for over 15 years in collaboration with others to change systems for education, the outdoors, and conservation to be more authentically inclusive, equitable, and just for all. She has facilitated conversations about the intersections of identities, the need for cross racial solidarity, viewing the world through the lens of queerness, and the necessity for social justice in conservation and education in New Mexico and nationally. 

Rachel “Rae” Miller believes in work that builds community centered processes to solve our most pressing problems and establishes systems for collaborative growth moving forward. Having worked with Vicki Pozzebon in various capacities since 2009 (from small business planning support to developing farm to restaurant programming), she now designs and facilitates programming and oversees logistics for Prospera Partners. Here Rae is part of a  team that shares a talent for creating spaces that encourage relationship building while guiding and inspiring sustainable systems change for our communities.

Creativity and critical thinking are central to how Rae approaches her work. As a multi-faceted professional that’s taken a nontraditional path, she has a deep understanding of how to navigate the complexity of our systems while reimagining what is possible. In a world where we have been socialized in binary or linear thinking, Rae challenges these norms through her work with Prospera Partners by weaving in a creative mindset developed as an artist who has also worked for more than a decade in the nonprofit sector in business development and fiscal operations management to communications strategies, membership management, and everything in between. 

Rae also brings compassion to her work. She is motivated by a commitment to human-centered systems and community-centered leadership. Her background in urban planning paired with an MBA leaves her uniquely qualified to understand diverse stakeholder needs, mediation strategies, and long-range planning along with the technical support needed to lift up the work along the way. 

Outside of Prospera Partners you can find Rae growing her art practice and creative community with her partner through Abstract Junction, an art collective. She also loves decompressing by getting outside as much as possible with her senior pup, Bella. Rae received a Bachelor’s degree in Urban Planning and an MBA from the University of Cincinnati.