Who We Are
New Coyote Consulting is a people-first equity and communications consulting firm serving BIPOC-led organizations and marginalized leaders coming into their power. After beginning an equity journey, many organizations find that old ways of messaging and management don’t line up with their current vision. New Coyote starts and leads with equity. With services ranging from training to strategy to content creation, we help our clients craft and support a communications strategy that makes money while centering their principles and core values.
Check out our website at newcoyote.com to learn more about who we are and what we do.
New Coyote became a certified benefit company in April of 2021.
Our Mission
At the core of our work is the principle that capitalism and colonialism are both rooted in white supremacy, made to extract value from the working class in order to preserve and increase wealth for the ultra rich. Because this understanding permeates everything we do, this foundational issue, and the liberation practice we cultivate to address it, must be accounted for in all our actions, both as individuals and as organizations.
Liberation practice starts internally. We can’t tell clients they need to resist toxic colonizer mindsets if we ourselves aren’t doing the necessary work and having that practice show up for us in our day to day. At New Coyote, the preferred workday length is 6 hours or fewer, but never any more. If we need more hours, we bring on more people. We break for breakfast, lunch and dinner if those meals are lining up with our working hours. We pay everyone a minimum of market median plus 10%, and we focus on work that gets results rather than work that checks boxes. In the state of Oregon, it is considered fraud for a company our size to provide health insurance, so we offer a merit raise of $3/hr to help offset the cost of insurance for our employees.
We prioritize clients who are transgender or gender nonconforming people and Black, Indigenous or other people of color, especially those who have recently come into their power.
2021 Summary and Key Metrics
As a Benefit Corporation for Good, we have a triple bottom line, meaning that we have an obligation to do right by people and the planet over and above profit.
PEOPLE
- We offer full scholarships to all public trainings, no questions asked, and have had scholarship recipients in every one of our trainings
- Funded the Willamette Valley Development Officers’ BIPOC Fundraisers Affinity Group budget at 100% for 2021 and recommitted for 2022
- Membership in Business for a Better Portland, a progressive chamber of commerce leveraging the power of business to do good in Portland and Oregon
- 100% of our staff and contractors identify as people from a marginalized group
- 6% of our annual net profits were donated to nonprofits in cash
- Special rate for justice-centered nonprofits
- More than $17,000 of in-kind donated to justice-centered nonprofit organizations
- Continue to pay a minimum of market median plus 10% for all staff and contractors
- Centering a liberation practice for staff and clients every day, growing and learning together, and sharing that learning in the form of a twice-weekly video series as well as monthly newsletters
- Free access to Masterclass for all staff
- Staff paid hourly rate to attend professional development classes
PLANET
- Paperless office
- Fully remote office
- CEO’s office powered by 100% renewable power
- Stand opposed to cryptocurrency, and NFTs due to their high carbon cost
- 100% virtual speaking and training schedule in 2021, resulting in no travel
PROFIT
- Led more than 30 justice-based trainings centering marginalized people and their experiences
- CEO appeared on 2 podcasts and 1 radio show
- Boss Fight
- Inner Light with Ellen
- Interview with Jacqueline Battise on KPFT Houston (People of Earth radio show)
- Presented a workshop at the 2021 WVDO conference
- Published The Planner for Doing Less
- Served 10 total clients
- Maxxed out at 80% of our full client capacity
- When averaged out over the full year, we beat our income goal every month of the year
- In real time, we beat our income goals 7 months out of 12
- Our highest earning month was November, when we earned 205% of goal
- Our lowest earning months were January and May
- We closed the year at 112% of goal for income
Coming Year
In 2022 we will:
- Fund the Willamette Valley Development Officers’ BIPOC fundraisers affinity group at 100% of budget again
- Increase staff pay
- In lieu of legal avenues for a company as small as ours to provide health insurance, offer a merit raise for health insurance
- Convert long-term contractor to staff position with paid sick and vacation time
- Increase the number of Justice-based trainings by 20%
- Expand our services to include grant writing
- Expand into coaching for transgender, gender nonconforming, Black, Indigenous and/or other leaders of color
- Increase our income goals by 50%
- Normally, this would be an unrealistic increase, but the increase in staff hours should naturally generate a 20–25% increase in income independent of our actions
In Closing
A Letter from our Founder and CEO, Marina Martinez-Bateman:
My Dear Friend,
What began in 2019 as a personal journey for me has grown into my wildest dreams. I was a newly recovering anorexic workaholic with a string of unhappy employment and small business situations behind me. All things I had joined or started hoping to find the justice-work I sought but also couldn’t sustain or make real for myself.
I worked 80-hour weeks protecting the right of the 40-hour work week, I unknowingly insulated racists and sexual harassers in spaces that were supposed to be safe, and I found myself in working relationships with verbally, emotionally and financially abusive people in an attempt to gain dignity for the workers and makers that we pretended to serve. Over and over, I could not find a way to help people instead of exploiting them. Because I didn’t know how to help myself without exploiting myself.
So I started a little newsletter writing service called Letter-O-Matic and decided that I would single out the one thing I could do over and over and make money doing, while I figured out how to treat myself as a worker first and foremost.
Three months later, the COVID pandemic shut down everything. In a matter of days, we lost 100% of our clients and 100% of the clients in the pipeline. And because I had no business history prior to 2020, we weren’t eligible for any aid.
Desperate, I reached out to my network and I asked them for whatever work they were willing to spare. I was at a precipice that felt like a cliff. I believed the previous 20+ years of my career were an abject failure, an exercise in futile hypocrisy and self-indulgent co-dependency with a system that had done as designed and, to paraphrase Beyonce, broke my soul.
I was ready and even a little bit relieved to go back to maid service, which had been my first business (and until now was my most successful one). But that wasn’t what my community needed from me. They wanted me to read their annual reports and tell them where the language was oppressive or lacking nuance. They wanted me to evaluate hiring and firing policies, and to coach them on transitions, both personal and professional. They wanted me to turn my experiences into trainings they could send their staff to, knowing I would center their people and not perpetuate oppression.
The thing I’d always done for my employers and my clients, the thing I was always told had been “too much” or “over the line” in other arenas was the thing people wanted from me now at my lowest point. The battles for equity and justice work that I had fought and thought I’d lost were what informed my vast knowledge of the landscape of unknowns and questions my clients needed help with.
After the senseless, public murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin, and the predictably racist, fascist, and violent response from police forces nation-wide, I experienced a level of clarity. I felt like a failure in my previous positions because I had failed myself.
By attempting to mitigate harm from within a harmful system, I had only grown that harm and made it more possible by throwing good, smart, dedicated work into a machine made to exploit us. There was never going to be any way to feel okay with my participation in that machine, even if it was wearing a nonprofit hat or a union hat, or a justice hat. As long as the day to day operations were rooted in settler-colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism, that was the master I served in every iteration of my professional life from my first day of school until now.
The key was decolonizing myself, and using that process to lead me in decolonizing my business, my family, and my experience of life. I had been taught that justice and equity could be imposed on unjust and inequitable systems, or that they could be teased out at the very least.
I no longer believe that to be true. Only radical transformation can get us where we need to go. Radical transformation starts from within, centers our personal values, and casts aside the arbitrary hierarchies of oppression for new hierarchies based on real needs, personal and cultural values, accountability, and community.
2021 was our first official year with the name New Coyote, having changed it from Letter-O-Matic when it was clear that my little newsletter writing service grew into something far more dynamic and comprehensive.
I thought that I was giving up my calling when I left my last job and started this company. I thought that I had tried and failed to do the good work I set out to do in life. Now I understand that, as I put myself back together, not just from the old job but also from years of internalized capitalism and white supremacy, I was putting my life back together in a way that made sense for the me I am today. All of my experiences have led me here, and they will continue to lead me closer and closer to my truth and my path in the years to come.
That is the purpose of New Coyote, to be a pathfinder and a truth teller, and a friend in a world where these skills are not taught and more often than not, they are discouraged entirely. Thank you for joining me on this journey, I’m really excited for what year two will be like.
In Solidarity,
Marina Martinez-Bateman
CEO, New Coyote Consulting