Building stronger organizations for greater impact.
I offer comprehensive support in financial management, operations, governance, fundraising, and risk mitigation for nonprofits, unions, and foundations. My tailored coaching empowers leaders to navigate complexities and drive sustainable success.
Who I work with
I most enjoy working with up-and-coming operational leaders who are enthusiastic about finance, infrastructure and compliance.
My clients have had budgets from $2 million per year to over $1 billion per year, but most are in medium sized nonprofits ranging from ~$5 million to ~$15 million per year in budget.
My bio
Robert Fox is an executive operations and fundraising consultant with 35 years of experience leading national non-profit organizations and scaling them for success. For 8 years he served as Chief Operating Officer at MoveOn, guiding it from $7 million per year in income to a peak of over $64 million per year.
He was previously the Chief Operating Officer of Greenpeace USA, and was responsible for a $40 million annual budget and 550 staff during a period of rapid organizational growth and campaign success.
He also served as the Deputy Director of Working America, the AFL-CIO’s community organizing affiliate, from its founding in 2003 until 2011. At Working America he helped develop strategies that recruited 3.3 million new members through door-to-door engagement, and led a staff of up to 1,500 organizers.
Robert also led the union movement’s first coordinated online organizing effort as Director of the AFL-CIO’s Working Families Network, which linked over 8 million activists around the country. From 1994 to 2000, he worked at UNITE!, where he was the Assistant Organizing Director for the national union, after serving as a Lead Organizer on dozens of workplace unionization campaigns around the country.
Earlier in his career, Robert pursued an interest in visual media as Development Director at Downtown Community Television Center in New York City, the largest community television program in the nation, and as Executive Director of Impact Visuals, an international cooperative of progressive photojournalists.
Why I do this work
I’ve spent many years as a labor union organizer and political communications leader. I have a deep commitment to building power for working families through grassroots organizing. Over the years I became convinced that when progressive organizations lose, it’s usually not because we don’t have an effective message, or because we don’t know how to talk to people.
More frequently it’s because we don’t run our own organizations or campaigns well enough:
We don’t scale them large enough
We don’t run them efficiently enough
And we don’t invest enough in infrastructure and in operational leadership
That’s not the fault of our opponents, that’s our fault. And it’s something we can control.
I take joy in building smoothly functioning systems and nimble, high-efficiency organizations. It’s enormously satisfying to me when the numbers on my spreadsheet add up the way they are supposed to, and when they are easy for everyone to understand.
But the reason I lean into finance, operations and infrastructure work is that I think it’s usually the difference between winning and losing for progressive campaigns and organizations.
That’s what I’m here for.