Walter and Elise Haas Fund

“If you are considering working with Sheila, don’t wait! She has a special capacity to skillfully work with organizations large and small, at the beginning or fully blooming in their technology plans. If you start a partnership with her, she will be there for you no matter where you are in your project lifecycle.

The very first time I met Sheila, it was clear that she was a top-notch technologist and a brilliant systems thinker. She quickly understood the complexity of our circumstances and brought not just technical rigor, but all the other essentials: humor, empathy and unswerving calm. Right away I knew we were in good hands.

Sheila is great with our diverse team, calibrating her communication for leadership, project team members, and end users. She takes the time to coach us as solutions unfold so we’re left not only with strong systems, but stronger thinking and capacity for building upon them.

I met Sheila through our work with Fluxx and she was the first person we thought of when our Fluxx budget design aspirations exceeded our skillset. We brought her back again when we decided to open our portal to our trustees, knowing she’d get us where we needed to be quickly and at the highest level of quality. Working with Sheila allowed us to open a window into our grantmaking for the trustees, deepening their engagement in our work.” Suki O’Kane, Director of Administration

The J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation

“Sheila is great to work with. She is efficient, reliable and accessible. What I liked most about working with Sheila was feeling like I had a true partner. She worked alongside me in thinking about our grants management process, how we were using our system and how we could do it better.

We engaged Sheila to update and optimize our Fluxx grants management system after we had been on the platform for about two years. Sheila met with our team and listened thoughtfully to fully understand our business processes as well as the various needs and styles of our team members. She used that understanding to propose practical solutions that directly improved the efficiency of our grant management systems. Sheila knows the technical aspects of grant management technologies inside and out, and yet she is able to talk to not just grants managers, but to the entire team, respecting and considering each individual’s specific roles.

If you are looking to improve your business processes and get the most out of your grants management system, I highly recommend working with Sheila. She will ensure a smooth, effective solution. ” Margaret Buckley, Grants Manager

Select Equity Group Foundation

“Sheila quickly learned how I work and we easily established a mutual language and work rhythm to get the job done. She is accessible and I have fun working with her. She also encourages me to create clarity in what I need from our database system. I am somewhat tech savvy, but my job entails much more than the technical component of tracking the many points of our grant process. Sheila understands what my job entails, and adjusts both her expectations and the work she delivers to meet me where I am. As a department of one, I don’t have the bandwidth to optimize our Fluxx set-up, so we brought Sheila in to help enhance and expand our use of the database system.

Over phase one of our work Sheila and I have established a strong rapport and collaborative process that has streamlined our system. She helped me transform a multiple step cumbersome process into a simpler workflow that saves me, not just hours, but days of work. I bring Sheila my wishlist of what I would like for the system to do, and she does her best to find or create a way for the system to meet my needs. I recommend working with Sheila because you can go to her with your blue sky ideas, and she’ll do her best to make it work. I also respect that if she can’t meet those ideals exactly, she has the humility to admit it and tenacity to work with you to find the solution you are looking for.” Robert A Wilson, Executive Director

Foundation for a Healthy St. Pete

“It’s challenging to summarize what it’s like to work with Sheila because she is such a dynamic force. We hired her for technical support on our grant management software when I joined a new foundation. Our contract was for Sheila to help us prepare our system and to provide training for three competitive RFP cycles.

Sheila used her broad base of technical knowledge to ensure our grant management software was ready, while providing coaching to help the entire team get on board. She didn’t just use her expertise to fix our technical problems, she listened carefully to our challenges and successfully mentored and coached us through the complex situation. If your foundation is in need of assistance with any aspect of your grant management process, Sheila and her team at Duende is the force to bring in to help steer you to a successful outcome.”  Jaime F. Dixon, Program Officer

Grant Partners, Inc.

“Sheila is stupendously skilled and very pleasant to work with. She is proficient, efficient and responsive in our work together. She helps us work in Fluxx for three different grant programs each with their own site and workflow. We appreciate that she prioritizes a strong communication feedback loop to ensure that all of our needs are met. She consistently tracks the details and sees each piece of our various projects through to successful completion.

We have worked with many technical consultants over our five years in these grant programs, and Sheila has been by far the most proficient and effective in helping us achieve our organizational system goals. Our collaborative process with Sheila has helped us streamline and create efficient systems that save a tremendous amount of time. Her work has directly contributed to our organizational success by continually improving our sites and workflow. We highly recommend working with Sheila and her team at Duende if your foundation is looking for skilled experts who create clarity of expectations, meet deadlines, and will help your improve your technical grant management process.” Art Johnstone and Michael Turner, Directors

Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corporation

“Sheila has, by far, been the greatest at helping us learn how to use Fluxx to meet our specific grant making needs. Until Sheila started working with us we were not getting what we needed out of Fluxx and were feeling frustrated. She was able to quickly and efficiently help us work through the issues we’d been having. She was quick about her responses and balanced the fine line of making things both practical and understandable in a way that didn’t speak down to us.

Sheila was a great mentor and coach in the process of getting Fluxx to effectively meet our grant management needs. She encouraged us and worked with us in clear terms as grant managers with specific workflow to be accomplished in the technical platform. Her communication was always practical, personable and down to earth. We only ever want to work with Sheila when it comes to keeping our Fluxx system running smoothly. We want to recommend everyone who needs help in their technical grant management system to work with Sheila, as long as it doesn’t keep her from working with us when we need her!” Stephanie Nichols and Monique Hicks, Grant Managers

Knott Family Foundation

“I appreciated that Sheila was incredibly knowledgeable while being direct and precise in her engagement with us. After two years on the platform, we brought her in to help us reflect upon, refine and enhance our use of Fluxx in managing our grant process.

We wanted guidance in using the system to its fullest potential and Sheila helped us get much closer that. She started with a thorough and honest audit of our site and then delivered suggestions and training in an upfront, organized and hopeful manner. Working with Sheila helped us to improve the security of our system and apply best practices to the technical side of our grant management work. I recommend working with Sheila if you want to work with a highly skilled expert who has a practical no-nonsense approach to guiding your staff in implementing best practices in your grants management database. Kathleen McCarthy, Grants and Information Technology Manger 

Anonymous Recommendation

Sheila is one of my favorite people to work with. I was first introduced to Sheila when she was assigned to work with me on a Fluxx consulting project. Sheila is smart, patient and kind. The best thing about working with her is her ability to adapt to the client- she quickly understood my working and learning style and adapted to my needs. I felt respected and heard when working with her. I would highly recommend Sheila to any organization- now I just need to come up with another project so I can work with her again!