New Coyote Consulting: 2023 Annual Benefit Report

Who We Are

New Coyote Consulting is a people-first equity and communications consulting firm serving QTBIPOC professionals and their organizations. Both seasoned elders, and young-in-career leaders as they come into their power. We focus on like-minded, values based organizations because New Coyote starts and leads with equity. We are a full service firm providing coaching, training, strategy, content creation, and administrative support. We help our clients craft and deploy a communications strategy that makes money while centering their 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 January 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 4 hours, but never any more than 6. 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 used to pay everyone a minimum of market median plus 10%. This year, we switched our minimum pay to Portland metro living wage, which we interpret as $30.00 an hour for employees and $60.00 an hour for contractors. 70% of our staff and contractors have a higher rate of pay; 100% of staff and contractors who have been with us longer than a year earn a higher than minimum rate.

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 where these clients are doing impactful work in our communities.

Sustainability Statement

We recognize that the earth and her ecosystems existed before humanity, and she will persist long after the last person is gone. We’re not the first dominant species on this planet and we will likely not be the last. We don’t subscribe to the Judeo-Christian belief that the earth is ours to destroy or save. We are hers and it is our duty as citizens of this planet to steward her abundance properly.

At New Coyote, we focus on trying to save the humans. We do this by working in ways that don’t increase carbon emissions through daily commuting, massive paper production, or excess electricity and processing use via long hours of unproductive working. This also gives our staff more time and resources to invest in their individual values, which all lead back to healthy workers, a healthy economy, and a region that’s more able to resist extractive capitalist ecocide.

More importantly, we recognize that extractive capitalism has been and continues to be the engine of climate change. In addition to making climate friendly choices on a day to day basis, we are diligent in resisting this system, and teaching others how to resist it for themselves.

We stand firm that a long-term climate solution must include reparations, land-back, an end to the carceral state, and liberation for all marginalized people world-wide. This includes Palestinians, LGBTQIA+ people, people in the colonized world, the people mining cobalt in the Congo, and everyone else who is being forced to contribute to this crisis on pain of death, starvation, and poverty so the ultra-wealthy can grow their perceived worth while killing the planet to do so.

2023 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

• Gave our employee a raise
• Funded the People’s Nonprofit Accelerator’s BIPOC Fundraisers Affinity Group budget at 100% for 2023 and recommitted for 2024
• 100% of our staff and contractors identify as people from a marginalized group
• 3% of our annual net profits were donated to nonprofits in cash
• More than $50,000 of in-kind donated to justice-centered nonprofit organizations
• Committed to paying a minimum of $30/hr for employees and $60/hr for staff
• Centering a liberation practice for staff and clients every day, growing and learning together, and sharing that learning in the form of a weekly video series as well as twice-monthly newsletters
• Free access to Skillshare for all employees
• Free access to Dr. Nicole Truesdale’s Guerilla Resource Library for all employees
• Employees paid hourly rate to attend professional development classes
• CEO continues to mask at indoor and crowded events

Planet

• Paperless office
• Fully remote staff
• Stand opposed to cryptocurrency, and NFTs due to their high carbon cost

Profit

• Led 44 justice-based workshops and meet-ups centering marginalized people and their experiences
• Presented the keynote speech at the 2023 Fall Portland Parks Foundation Summit
• Working with Layered Social Impacts: How I Started A Thriving Values-Based Business In a Pandemic
• Presented a 30-minute workshop at the 2023 NTEN conference
• Training for Diverse Learning Styles
• Presented a workshop at the 2023 Travel Portland Partner Summit
• Deep Dive: E-Newsletter Marketing
• Served 17 total clients
• Presented courses in partnership with 2 like-minded organizations
• Reached 100% of our full client capacity multiple times throughout the year
• In real time, we beat our income goals 7 months out of 12
• Our highest earning month was March, when we earned 418% of goal
• Our lowest earning month was January
• We closed the year at 150% of goal for income

Coming Year

In 2024 we will:

• Maintain the programs and policies we have while continuing to execute quality work
• Grow our team
• Diversify our offerings
• Manage our client load:
  • Evaluate client fit
  • Implement tools to help determine client fit in the recruiting process
• Keep daily work hours to 4 per day
• Launch independent training offerings like Decolonizing Management
• Give employee raises
• CEO to dedicate more hours to training and speaking

In Closing

All the hard inner work we did in 2022 paid off big time in 2023. Going inside, prioritizing rest, and saying no to work that wasn’t meant for us in order to hold space for the right clients catapulted us into massive success in 2023 and proved that focusing on our values not only keeps us from harm, it enriches us in every way.

As CEO, I returned to in-person facilitation, speaking, and training in 2023. Since COVID, I had developed some very real and legitimate fears for someone with my health issues, as well as some irrational ones, around in-person gatherings. Going slowly, in small groups, with organizations I believe in and spaces where I feel safe has been the key to building my public speaking muscles back up.

On a personal level, I’ve been a regular public speaker since I was a teenager, driving around California and Arizona talking about mental health and organizing other youth against the second Gulf War. To be cut off from one of my favorite activities, something I’ve worked hard to be good at over the years, and to even find it frightening and stressful shook me so much that it had a negative impact on my identity.

One of the ways I was able to find myself again has been through dance. By connecting with my body in self-paced, intentional community dance classes here in Portland, I found something I didn’t even have before pandemic. And that is a line of communication between my brain and body that was cut off from me, like many of us, at a very young age. Exploring my body’s wisdom has helped me to see my grief, from COVID, from before COVID, not as a black hole, but as a building block in my life going forward.

COVID is, of course, not over, and I continue to mask when I go indoors. I’m also continuing to get my COVID boosters every six months to protect myself, my family, and the other vulnerable people in my life. And also, my life may be very different than it was before COVID, but it is more intentional, I have more time for close family and friends, and I’ve found a new friend in my lovely, strong body who has overcome so much and is such a support to me and those around me.

This year has settled us, as a company. We’re no longer blinking around dazedly with the newborn eyes of a baby organization. We’re by no means mature, but we have our feet under us and after the lessons we learned in scarcity in 2022, we’ve been blessed to learn new lessons from abundance. And they are to trust ourselves, to listen to our bodies, to take care of ourselves, and to stand on top of our grief rather than lie prone underneath it.

In Solidarity,

Marina
CEO, New Coyote Consulting