Testimonials
“Alan’s coaching around issues of race and gender equity has had a profound impact on my personal and work life.”
– Sam Scoville, Grants and Program Specialist,
Snohomish County Human Service Department
“I’ve worked with Alan for over two decades on matters of state and federal tax and budget policy, social change philanthropy, money matters, class privilege, and organizational leadership and transition. He is a thoughtful, compassionate listener and coach who has personally wrestled and discerned on the topics of his coaching. With his unique experience in the worlds of progressive social movements, courageous organizational leadership, philanthropy and personal liberation, I would choose Alan as the person to accompany me on any personal journey or organizational transition effort.”
Chuck Collins
Program Director, The Program for Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies
“Alan’s coaching around issues of race and gender equity has had a profound impact on my personal and work life. His support helped me better understand and work through my own biases and my own advantages as a white male that have acted as a barrier in the past. As a result of the coaching, I feel far better equipped to collaborate, lead and guide for a more inclusionary and racially just response to help better our community.”
Sam Scoville
Grants and Program Specialist, Snohomish County Human Service Department
“For the past three years, I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with Alan in his role as an advisor to the Board I serve on. He has coached the executive leadership team on several key organizational development projects, including equity and governance, action planning, hiring, and the executive director performance evaluation. Alan is a thoughtful, steadying force who always seems to have a framework or path forward for whatever strategic issue the organization is tackling.”
Katie Escudero
Board of Directors, Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness
“Alan was incredibly helpful helping my wife and I navigate through the daunting landscape of how best to make the world a better place with our financial resources. He brings a well-educated, systematic and non-judgmental approach to his work, and understands the challenges inherent in making decisions about how and where to give money. Alan really helped to get us from start to finish in a productive and expedited manner.”
David L.
Olympia, WA
“My goals going into coaching were to push myself to be more generous and to live up to my own expectations regarding how much to give. Alan enabled me to break things down into bite-sized pieces that did not seem overwhelming. He was part counselor, part cheerleader, and encouraged me at every step. At the same time, he provided feedback that helped me to become clearer about my own intentions. Alan was especially helpful in the joint creation of a mission statement that reflected my values. I provided the basic ingredients, and Alan asked questions that helped me shape and refine those elements into a mission statement that ‘fit.’ Overall, I now have much more confidence in my ability to think clearly about money.”
Carolyn McCoy
Individual Donor
“Alan is a seasoned consultant who has an admirable committment to redistribution of wealth and willingness to use his privilege and resources in service of transformational change. His understanding of power dynamics in philanthropy informs his ability to think out of the box to challenge individual donors and the sector as a whole to re-examine their giving practices.”
Beth Rosales
Retired Philanthropy Consultant
“I have known Alan Preston and have co-facilitated race and class training with him for over a decade. He is knowledgeable, inclusive, flexible and innovative in his intersectional class and race work. Coming from very different backgrounds, Alan was open and willing to ‘do the work’ with me that we then facilitated for others: the impact of race, class, gender and any other identities we carry. Initially, the work Alan led was specifically about class, and he quickly realized it was inauthentic to ignore the inextricable intertwining of race and class and took the lead in designing an Exploring Class curriculum that centers both. He is conscious of his whiteness and is intentionally and authentically inclusive in the work he facilitates. Alan understands there is always more to learn and add to his skills and repertoire as a coach, mentor and facilitator.”