The TL;DR version for clients:
- The name change represents a new direction for the company (now solely owned by Vivian Bush). I’ll still be writing federal, state, local, and foundation grants, but I’m also offering consulting on organizational structure and culture to help your “hive” thrive.
- Thriving Hive will honor all existing contracts with Grant-AID Consulting, with no action needed on your part.
- Please change the company name in your accounting system to Thriving Hive Consulting, LLC, so that the bank will honor your payments.
- My new email address is vivian@thrivinghiveconsulting.com for correspondence and the weekly Funding 411 newsletter. Please make sure to whitelist this address with your spam filters so that you don’t miss out on emails.
- The company website is now http://www.thrivinghiveconsulting.com.
The rest of the story:
As you may know, Grant-AID founding partner Lindsey Peña accepted a full-time job more than a year ago, where she is helping establish a new nonprofit organization related to collecting and using geospatial data. Originally she intended to keep doing consulting work through Grant-AID on the side, but her job has proven to take up all her time and energy, and she has not been active in the company for about a year now. We made a mutual decision to shift the company solely into my name. Please join me in wishing Lindsey the best of continuing success with her new-ish job!
At the same time, it seemed an opportune moment to update the company name. I am working on a Ph.D. in Organizational Leadership from Johnson University and am writing my dissertation on the role of lateral leadership organizational structures in breaking down organizational silos. The idea of lateral leadership (leading peers without formal authority) has been around for a long time, but it’s only within the last ten years or so that organizations have been actually planning their structure around it in ways that look radically different from a typical “top-down” org chart. I think the concept has great potential to help social service nonprofits operate more effectively, and I hope to start coaching clients in implementing lateral leadership structures.
The name “Thriving Hive” was chosen to reflect both halves of the expanded consulting business: grant writing and structure consulting. A beehive is a good metaphor for a prosperous, well-supplied, well-structured organization. Bees are famous for industriously bringing in the resources they need to feed themselves and others, and they work together side by side without formal authority structures to produce hexagonal honeycomb, the most efficient use of materials to create a regular lattice of cells within a given volume. In the same way, I hope to help nonprofits bring in the funding they need to thrive, and also to create organizational structure and culture that makes all their stakeholders buzz with happiness.
Please reach out to me if you have any questions about the change, or if you want to learn more about lateral leadership structures. I’d love to tell you more!
Thriving Hive Consulting 