Helping Nonprofit Leaders Thrive in Their Toughest Year
Real-world strategies and honest insights for leaders in their first years or their most challenging.
Leading a mission-driven organization can feel like steering a ship through shifting tides, balancing the needs of your team, your board, and your community while staying true to the mission. I’ve led through moments of growth, crisis, and reinvention, and I know how isolating leadership can be. Here, you’ll find practical tools, candid insights, and strategies drawn from real-world experience to help you navigate challenges, strengthen your organization, and lead with clarity and resilience.
Emily Norton Ashinhurst offers insights and expertise for nonprofit leaders seeking to elevate their impact and navigate challenges with confidence.
Empowering Nonprofits Everywhere
Our Mission
I dedicate myself to traveling alongside nonprofit leaders, providing essential resources through speaking, writing, and consulting. My commitment to enriching the nonprofit sector ensures that every executive and organization can thrive as they pursue their essential missions.
Services
How I Work with Nonprofits
Every nonprofit leader’s journey is different, but the challenges are often familiar — balancing mission and resources, leading through change, and keeping people aligned when the path isn’t clear. My work is about meeting you where you are, whether that’s through an inspiring keynote, a hands-on workshop, or one-on-one advisory. However we work together, my goal is the same: to help you lead with clarity, resilience, and impact.
Speaking Engagements
I deliver keynotes that blend honest storytelling with practical strategies nonprofit leaders can use right away. Whether I’m speaking at a conference, a leadership retreat, or a community event, my goal is to leave people feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to take their next step.
Workshops & Training
I design interactive sessions for boards, leadership teams, and emerging leaders. Every workshop is tailored to your organization’s unique challenges and goals, with a focus on real-world tools that build confidence, clarity, and momentum.
Leadership Coaching
Sometimes you need more than advice. You need a trusted partner who understands the weight of leadership. I work with nonprofit executives navigating transitions, crises, or high-stakes decisions, offering both a sounding board and a clear framework for moving forward
About Me
About Me
I have spent my career leading mission-driven organizations through their most pivotal moments: the seasons of growth, the periods of uncertainty, and the crossroads where every decision matters. My work has taken me from small community centers to multi-million-dollar nonprofits, and in every role I have learned that real leadership is about far more than strategy or metrics. It is about people.
One of the most defining chapters of my life began when I stepped into the Executive Director role at the Irish Diaspora Center only 83 days before my husband died by suicide. In that moment, leadership stopped being theoretical. I had to show up for my staff, my board, and my community while navigating profound personal loss. It taught me that the strongest leaders are those who lead without armor: honest, grounded, and deeply connected to their values.
Since then I have served as CEO, board chair, fundraiser, mentor, and advisor, helping nonprofit leaders find clarity in complexity and confidence in uncertainty. I have built teams, navigated crises, secured transformational funding, and worked with boards to strengthen governance and mission alignment. Along the way I have also written extensively about leadership, capturing the realities that so many leaders face but few talk about openly.
Today, through speaking, writing, and advisory work, I help leaders do the hard work of aligning vision with action, sustaining themselves through the demands of the role, and making decisions that leave a legacy. My upcoming book, What No One Tells the New Executive Director, is part survival guide and part field manual. It is born out of lived experience and the shared wisdom of leaders who have walked this path.
I believe the work you do as a leader should matter not just while you are in the role but long after you have moved on. I am here to help make that happen.