We help philanthropy, nonprofits, and social enterprise grow their impact, operations, and funding.
We’ve Worked With:
What We Do:
Strategy
With experience in nearly every kind of change strategy—federal, state, and local policy advocacy; strategic communications; narrative change; litigation; voter mobilization; and ballot initiative campaigns—GROW can help you design, prioritize, and integrate your social impact strategies.
Funding
Co-creating success between funders and practitioners is one of the most important things an organization can do to support social change. GROW has helped lead fundraising campaigns big and small—from the ACLU’s Leading Freedom Forward Campaign to the Vera Institute’s Campaign for Justice.
Growth
GROW’s philosophy for growing your impact, operations, and funding is grounded in “strategic vision” and alignment. How do you scale effectively and sustainably? How do you manage the challenges that come with growth? GROW has done it with every size organization.
Who We Are:
Kevin Keenan is the owner and founder of executive consulting firm GROW Strategies LLC. Kevin is the former COO & General Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Executive Director of the ACLU of San Diego, and Executive Vice President & Special Counsel of the Vera Institute of Justice. He represented children in Virginia’s juvenile prisons; assisted police reform efforts in Belfast, Northern Ireland; and monitored elections in Bosnia, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Kazakhstan. He is author of the book Invasion of Privacy, and, with Sam Walker, “An Analysis of Law Enforcement Officers’ Bills of Rights”. He is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a graduate of Yale Law School and Swarthmore College.
In his leadership roles, Kevin has always combined programmatic focus and success with organizational growth and fundraising. To do so requires a high degree of organizational alignment and an eye for efficiencies. How do we do the most with what we have? How do we make sure our work is meeting the multiple needs of our organization and departments?
What Clients Are Saying:
Kevin grew the ACLU of San Diego from 7 staff to 24 and from a budget of $800,000 a year to $3 million with a reserve of $5.1 million that supported further growth. But more importantly—and inextricably intertwined with the funding growth and organizational transformation—was a growth in impact.
As one example, in the notoriously anti-immigrant city of Escondido, the ACLU partnered with community leaders to mobilize voters in the heavily Latino downtown, ultimately turning out 8% of the electorate and lifting up their power as a must-have voting bloc. After years of the ACLU litigating abuses by the city after they happened, the anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies subsided in the face of a more powerful Latino community.
While Ferguson exploded and the Supreme Court reconsidered affirmative action, Kevin helped the NAACP Legal Defense Fund organize its back office to more effectively run its nationwide civil rights advocacy. As COO & General Counsel, Kevin developed new internal systems and policies, helped negotiate two labor union contracts, led an IT overhaul, modernized the scholarship program, and helped the Director Counsel achieve some longstanding organizational goals—including opening the organization’s archives at the Library of Congress and securing $5 million to open a new research and policy center The Thurgood Marshall Institute.
At the Vera Institute of Justice, Kevin supervised several nationwide flagship programs to improve the criminal justice system and helped guide the organization’s growth from 165 to 325 staff. He was a lead fundraiser in Vera’s $135 million fundraising Campaign for Justice and a key designer of the organization’s revamped innovation and scaling infrastructure The Impact Pipeline. By mobilizing diverse business leaders, he led the effort to successfully persuade conservative U.S. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) to support Pell Grant funding for people in prison.
Through representing children in Virginia’s juvenile justice system, Kevin saw first-hand the way children were set up to fail. When leaving juvenile prisons, the state did almost nothing to reconnect children to schools and mental health services in their communities. Kevin led the adoption of two important legal reforms: a regulation to improve school reentry and a bipartisan bill, signed by then Governor Mark Warner, to improve mental health reentry.