Kathleen Guy

Coming from a family of teachers and educational administrators, Kathleen Guy has always held a deep belief in the value of education. It’s part of her DNA. The product of a community college experience that had a profound influence on her chosen life’s work, she held various positions in higher education advancement for more than thirty years while also co-founding the Eaton Cummings Group.

When Kathleen began consulting with community colleges and other non-profits, the concept of creating supplemental revenue streams through philanthropy was still fairly new. Even today, she finds that many organizations still assume they must constrain their vision based on the limitations of available public or fee-for-service funding. A big part of Kathleen’s role is helping leadership teams realize that their potential to think boldly about their vision for the future is limited only by their imagination.

In her day-to-day work with clients, Kathleen is encouraged that more organizational leaders are thinking about resource development and fundraising not as an add-on, but as a central part of their role in keeping an organization healthy and vibrant. She loves helping clients to take a more integrated “lifestyle” (vs. episodic) approach to capacity building, and watching the subtle-but-profound shift that this change in perspective brings.

In her downtime, Kathleen loves spending time with her four young grandchildren, enjoying every season in the outdoors snowshoeing, hiking, kayaking and pontooning; volunteering on several non-profit boards in her community; traveling to places like Africa (where she recently participated in a Rotary service project to build a secondary school), listening to music and reading. She is also working on two books about the future of community colleges and philanthropy. On her best weeks, she also enjoys reading the Sunday New York Times cover to cover without interruptions over a cup of really good coffee.