True North Management Consulting

Center for Progressive Leadership: Finance

True North worked with The Center for Progressive Leadership (CPL), a national political training institute, to develop a new budget process. CPL’s former budget process was fairly unstructured; and while the old process met the organization’s earlier needs, the process was straining as CPL grew larger and more complex.

“Ari brings tremendous business savvy and incisive strategic thinking to the nonprofit sector.”
– Peter Murray, President, CPL

Prior to True North’s involvement, the budget was not completed until well after the fiscal year had begun; Regional offices did not have sufficient input into their budgets; and each Regional office used a different budget template.

The budget process that True North created with CPL addressed multiple goals. The new budget process: • Marries CPL’s culture of dialogue and consensus with new emphases on accountability and governance
•Adds greater structure, including firm target dates for budget completion, while also increasing flexibility to address unforeseen events
• Solicits a greater level of input from Regional offices while reducing their actual workload
•Encourages innovation by the Regional offices
• Provides an appropriate balance between National and Regional office goals
• Can easily grow with the organization
• Supports CPL’s need to track multiple programs across multiple offices with various types of restricted and un-restricted funding.