Social Catalyst Consulting helps mission-driven organizations navigate complexity through listening, inquiry, facilitation, learning, and thoughtful action.
Founded in 2019, Social Catalyst Consulting partners with nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, philanthropic organizations, government agencies, and social impact ventures to strengthen leadership, foster meaningful engagement, strengthen relationships, and advance the common good.
The firm is grounded in the belief that meaningful change begins with understanding. Organizations are ultimately collections of people, relationships, experiences, and aspirations. Before solutions can be identified, it is essential to understand what people are experiencing, what they value, and what conditions will allow them to thrive.
Through an inquiry-based approach, Social Catalyst Consulting creates the conditions for individuals and organizations to engage honestly, learn continuously, strengthen relationships, and move forward with greater clarity and purpose.
Whether supporting strategic planning, facilitating difficult conversations, engaging diverse stakeholders, developing leaders, conducting research, or launching new initiatives, the firm’s work is guided by a simple principle: the quality of the process shapes the quality of the outcome.
Social Catalyst Consulting’s approach is rooted in a deliberate progression:
Listening → Learning → Alignment → Strategy → Thoughtful Action
Listening reveals insights. Learning creates understanding. Alignment builds trust and commitment. Strategy establishes direction. Thoughtful action creates lasting impact.
Amy Chan is the founder and principal of Social Catalyst Consulting. She is an educator, facilitator, strategist, and cross-sector leader whose work spans higher education, nonprofit leadership, philanthropy, entrepreneurship, and community engagement. For more than twenty years, she has helped organizations strengthen leadership, build partnerships, engage diverse stakeholders, and navigate periods of growth, change, and innovation.
Throughout her career, Amy has worked with organizations of varying sizes, missions, and stages of development. She has advised executive leaders, management teams, boards of directors, educators, entrepreneurs, students, and community leaders, helping them translate ideas into strategy and strategy into thoughtful action.
Before launching Social Catalyst Consulting, Amy served as Associate Dean of Students and Director of the University Community Service Center at the University of Chicago, a center founded by Michelle Obama in 1996, where she expanded the center’s portfolio of programs from 5 to 13, oversaw partnerships with more than 250 organizations throughout Chicago, and developed innovative initiatives that engaged thousands of undergraduate and graduate students each year.
Earlier in her career, Amy served as Director of Youth Programs at the Coro Center for Civic Leadership in San Francisco, where she oversaw leadership development programs in partnership with a dozen high schools throughout the Bay Area. Before that, she held leadership positions with Citizen Schools in Boston and San Jose, where she helped expand experiential learning opportunities for over 5,000 middle school students living in low-income communities. These experiences continue to shape the firm’s commitment to leadership development, civic engagement, and community partnership.
Today, Amy advises leaders and organizations seeking to translate vision into strategy and strategy into thoughtful action. Recent engagements have included partnerships with Brown University, Coro Northern California, City Colleges of Chicago, ESO Ventures, Justice Informed, and the Shared Prosperity Community Corporation (SPCC.1).
Amy received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Carleton College and her Master of Education degree from Harvard University and is a certified Critical Friends Group coach through the National School Reform Faculty.
In 2021, Social Catalyst Consulting was selected through a competitive process to guide Brown University’s Swearer Center for Public Service through a six-month strategic planning process involving the center’s leadership team and more than one hundred stakeholders, including university leaders, faculty members, students, alumni, staff members, and community partners.
The engagement was designed to help the center better understand its strengths, identify opportunities for growth, and strengthen its long-term impact within both the university and the broader community. Through interviews, focus groups, strategic planning sessions, and qualitative analysis, Social Catalyst Consulting helped create a process that encouraged reflection, learning, alignment, and thoughtful action.
The relationship between Social Catalyst Consulting and Justice Informed reflects the power of long-standing professional relationships built upon trust and shared values. Years earlier, Amy Chan recruited Justice Informed founder Xavier Ramey in 2014 to join her team at the University of Chicago. After working together for several years, their professional relationship evolved into a consulting partnership in 2021 centered on equity, community engagement, and meaningful social change.
As project co-lead and primary project manager for a community engagement and racial equity initiative with the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance, Amy helped guide a process involving surveys, focus groups, document review, and qualitative analysis to strengthen trust, transparency, accessibility, and community engagement. Throughout the project, diverse perspectives and lived experiences were intentionally incorporated into the process to ensure that the resulting recommendations reflected the needs and aspirations of the community itself.
From 2022 to 2024, Amy served as a strategic adviser to ESO Ventures, an organization committed to expanding opportunities for Black and Brown entrepreneurs through investment, incubation, and ecosystem development. Over the past several years, the organization has supported more than 700 entrepreneurs and deployed more than $8 million in capital to support business growth and innovation.
Working closely with Co-Founder & Partner Alfredo Mathew III, Amy helped guide strategic planning, leadership development, and organizational alignment as the organization expanded its work and impact. That partnership later evolved into the launch in 2024 of SPCC.1 (Shared Prosperity Community Corporation), an R&D firm focused on questions of economic opportunity, community voice, and economic democracy. Together, Amy and Alfredo continue to explore how institutions, communities, and entrepreneurs can work together to create more equitable and sustainable systems of opportunity.
