New Coyote Consulting: 2024 Annual Benefit Report

Who We Are

New Coyote Consulting is a people-first marketing and communications consulting firm serving QTBIPOC professionals and their organizations, including 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 impact.

We are a full-service firm providing coaching, training, strategy, content creation, web design, 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

New Coyote’s mission is to radically transform the economic landscape of the Pacific Northwest by providing consulting and training that grows wealth for those most impacted by colonizer capitalism. Our generational vision is set on a future where no one ever dies from poverty again.

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. Our minimum pay rate is Portland metro living wage, which we interpret as $33.00 an hour for employees and $66.00 an hour for contractors. 100% of our staff and contractors are currently paid a higher rate. Over the past 5 years, 100% of staff and contractors who have been with us longer than a year earn higher than the minimum rate.

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.

As a rule, we focus on work that gets results rather than work that checks boxes. That’s why we prioritize clients who are transgender or gender nonconforming people, and Black, Indigenous or other people of color, because when organizations are led by the people they serve, they are far more likely to be 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 residents 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 that the ultra-wealthy can grow their perceived worth while killing the planet to do so.

2024 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 2024 and recommitted for 2025
100% of our staff and contractors identify as people from a marginalized group
6% of our annual net profits were donated to nonprofits and community causes in cash (up from 3% in 2023)
More than $100,000 of in-kind donated to justice-centered nonprofit organizations
Committed to paying a minimum of $30/hr for employees and $60/hr for staff
No staff or contractors currently make minimum rate, as they have received raises
CEO makes 4.25% more than employee
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
Computers purchased through Costco, which has a union and pays higher than minimum wage
We end relationships with vendors who no longer share our values

Planet

Paperless billing, tracking, and reporting
We recycle
Enrolled in Portland General Electric energy saving programs for business
CEO’s office has eco-friendly LED lighting
Fully remote staff means no commuting, no road wear, no empty office using excess electricity for a separate building
Buying from local, minority owned vendors for office supplies and equipment wherever possible to reduce shipping
Stand opposed to cryptocurrency, and NFTs due to their high carbon cost
Refuse to willingly use AI
Working from home means no disposable mugs, individually packaged snacks, and no extra waste

Profit

Launched Decolonizing Management as an independent course and taught two cohorts, exceeding the previous year’s income when the curriculum was taught in partnership with a larger organization
Taught two sessions of How to Succeed in Anti-Capitalist Business in partnership with PUGS at Alder Commons
Led 70 justice-based workshops, meet-ups or coaching sessions centering marginalized people and their experiences (a 77% increase from 2023)
Participated in 12 trainings to increase our skills
Presented 2 sessions of Confronting Toxic Productivity in Values-Based Work, and an Inspire Talk, at the 2024 Better at Business Together Summit
Presented Creating Needs-Based Workplans at the 2024 NTEN conference, 24NTC
Served 13 total clients
Reached 80% of our full client capacity
In real time, we beat our income goals 7 months out of 12 (same as 2023)
Our highest earning month was March, when we earned 337% of goal
Our lowest earning month was June, when we earned less than 30% of goal
We closed the year at 126% of goal for income

Coming Year

In 2024 we will:

Give our employee a raise
Maintain the programs and policies we have while continuing to execute quality work
Increase minimum pay to $33/hr for employees and $66/hr for contractors
Do what we can to insulate our clients against the incoming fascist administration
Collaborate with other service providers in progressive spaces so we can respond quickly to any issues that come up
Continue to diversify our offerings
Keep daily work hours to 4 per day
Based on previous success, create training products and a marketing pipeline for organizational trainings

In Closing

I’m writing this one week before Thanksgiving in 2025. Normally, our annual report is done around mid-year. Our world changed so severely and so quickly on January 20, 2025 when the current President took office, that we have spent the last nine months surviving from month to month, then from payroll to payroll, unsure until this month if we can make it to the end of the year. Combined with the cooling effect his inauguration had on the market, his immoral budget cuts and criminalization of services and watchdog agencies, along with the hatchet job DOGE did on federal departments and nonprofits, our cash position is down more than 75% from last year.

In this environment, our annual reporting felt like the absolute last thing I could focus on or do. We pivoted quickly from consulting. Instead, we poured all our energy into training, which has successfully brought us through this storm so far. During COVID, I compared New Coyote to a little boat on a churning ocean. Because of our size, we could pop back up, cutting across wave after wave, even as they wiped out larger, slower boats who took on water they couldn’t bail out. It’s like that again, but this time, the disease ripping through our community, tearing our colleagues apart, leaving death and destruction in its wake is simple, purposeful, man made fascism.

And unlike COVID, fascism is a disease I know how to fight. I’ve talked on social media about my great uncle Jesse, who died June 6, 1944 on Normandy beach fighting the same creeping terror we’re up against today. My grandma Carmen lost all her brothers in the war, and met my grandpa when she was a women’s reservist at a Marine Corps dance.

My Mexican family was only one generation in the US when we decided to sacrifice everything for the dream of liberty she promised us and all the other immigrants before and after. It’s a dream built on stolen land, on stolen labor, but it’s a dream we must hold together with indigenous people, Black people, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and all marginalized people everywhere as we push forward for justice; for a liberty that finally touches all of us.

Over and over this year, I have thought of the quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Founders Day speech at Spelman College in 1960: “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run, then walk. If you can’t walk, then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.” In the speech, Dr. King warns the students at Spelman not to get bogged down in stagnation, not to grow complacent or conformist, but to stand up for what’s right, even when it’s not popular.

This year brought down veritable mountains of federal and social organizations, but in his speech, Dr. King tells the students of Spelman to come down off the stagnating mountains they were born to. This is the mandate from liberatory leaders throughout the years: When the ground moves under our feet, we move our feet to the new ground.

Looking back on 2024 from here, I remember how stressed out I was. In 2022, we left all non-aligned clients and experienced a surge of growth in 2023 that defined the year as our best ever, both financially and for our systems. Then in the first quarter of 2024 we experienced a small ethical crisis. Some clients who were aligned with us changed their policies, or we learned new information about their practices that violated the conduct clause in our contract. It was a no-brainer that we had to cut ties. New Coyote exists to support anti-racist, pro-Black, pro-Native, pro-LBGTQ+ organizations, and we can’t work for anyone who isn’t aligned with that, not just in word, but in practice.

Unfortunately, this represented a loss of about 30% of our annual income. I spent the rest of the year trying to make up for it and slid into end-of-year down just 2% from 2023. But unlike the previous year, I felt like I was failing financially because I made the right choice ethically. I was struggling to balance everything, and I was very attached to my identity as a successful business owner.

Reviewing 2024 from where I am now, I feel silly that I wasted so much time and energy on being successful or not being successful, when what really matters is being effective. It’s true that if we hadn’t ended the year in such a good position, we wouldn’t have had the capital I used to keep us going through the worst of 2025. It’s also true that the income streams we developed and boosted while trying to close the gap are sustaining us now, and if I hadn’t ended those relationships, we would be much worse off now. But something I could have internalized at the time is that being a successful business owner is only important as long as it serves our mission of radically transforming the economic landscape of the Pacific Northwest. The second that changes, we change. That’s our strength, the ability to move before the market moves because we are chasing something greater than money.

In Solidarity,

Marina
CEO, New Coyote Consulting