Lilea Duran is the Co-Founder and CEO of Common Good Collaborative, where she leads systems change work grounded in a clear conviction: the strongest, most durable solutions are built alongside the communities they serve. That means treating community voice not as input to gather, but as expertise to build on.
Across 12 years in leadership development and strategic planning, Lilea has designed and led complex statewide initiatives in California using human-centered design. Her track record spans nonprofits, public agencies, and school districts, where she has consistently helped senior leaders translate ambitious vision into structured, community-informed action.
Leaders who work with Lilea know they can count on her for strategic counsel that is both rigorous and values-driven. She brings equity and community voice into every phase of her work, not as an afterthought, but as the foundation on which lasting change is built.
A proud 18-year resident of Napa and a lifelong reader, Lilea brings the same curiosity and discipline to her work that she brings to every book she picks up: asking better questions, sitting with complexity, and always looking for what others might miss.
Alisa Pickett is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy & Operating Officer of Common Good Collaborative, where she builds the internal architecture that makes bold, community-driven work possible. Her core belief: that the most effective organizations are built when structure, people, and vision are woven together with intention and joy.
Across her career, Alisa has specialized in annual and strategic planning, board and governance development, and organizational communications, translating ambitious goals into concrete roadmaps that teams can execute with clarity and enthusiasm. She has a particular talent for placing the right people in the right roles, ensuring that both the plan and the people behind it are energized by the work ahead.
Leaders who work with Alisa know they can count on her to make complexity feel manageable. She builds the kind of alignment that doesn't just keep teams moving, but gives them something to move toward with purpose.
A proud native of Berkeley — a city long defined by its willingness to catalyze change and cast new ways of thinking into the world — Alisa brings that same spirit to every organization she helps build. She believes durable change doesn't happen by accident. It takes creativity, discipline, and future-forward thinking.
We saw what
happens when
the consultant leaves.
It usually starts the same way. A senior leader, exhausted yet hopeful, signs a contract with a consulting firm. The firm runs the sessions. Produces the documents. Presents the strategy. And then — invoices cleared — disappears. Leaving behind a binder. And an organization exactly where it started.
We've sat across the table from too many leaders who had been through this cycle. Once, twice, three times. Each time a little more money gone. A little more staff trust eroded — people who showed up believing in the mission, watched the process play out, and quietly stopped believing the organization meant what it said.
And the community? The people the organization exists to serve? They felt it too. Every unmet promise, every strategy that never made it past the slide deck, every year the language changed but the experience didn't — it compounds. Trust doesn't erode all at once. It leaves quietly, one disappointed expectation at a time.
Meanwhile, the organization learns to cope. It finds the one person on staff who can hold everything together — the one who knows every system, carries every relationship, bridges every gap the last consultant left behind. It starts to rely on unicorns. Exceptional people doing impossible jobs, because the organization never built the infrastructure to function without them. And when that person burns out or moves on, the cycle starts again.
That's what we couldn't live with anymore.
Common Good Collaborative was built on a single conviction: the plan is not the work. The work is what happens after — in the board meeting where a hard decision gets avoided, in the staff meeting where equity is talked about but not practiced, in the year three budget cycle when everything the strategy promised gets quietly set aside.
Real change requires someone who is still in the room when it gets difficult. Someone who asks harder questions than are comfortable. Someone whose name is still on the line when the plan meets reality.
So that's what we became. Not a vendor. Not a report-writer. A partner who has decided your organization's success is our problem too — and who stays until it holds.
We work across every level — governance, leadership, staff, community — because capacity that only lives at the top doesn't survive the next transition. Every session, every deliverable, every hard conversation is designed with one question: does this make your people more capable, or more dependent?
We plan our exit from day one. Not because we're eager to leave — but because the goal was never your reliance on us. It was always your organization's ability to lead change on its own terms, long after we're gone.
That's not humility. That's the whole point.